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WORDSWORTH, SHELLEY, KEATS. 



a:. - ! j 



OTHER ESSAYS. 



WORDSWORTH, SHELLEY, KEATS, 



AND 



OTHER US SAYS. 



BY 



DAVID MASSON, M.A., LL.D., 

Professor of Rhetoric and English TAterature in the University of Edinburgh. 




JTmtiftm: 

MA'CMILLAN AND CO. 

1874 

[The Eight of Translation and Reproduction is reserved.] 



1W' 

jy|3 4- y 



LONDON : 
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
BREAD STREET HILL. 



/ 



— * >J o 



PREFATORY NOTE. 

The first, second, fifth, and sixth of the Essays in- 
cluded in the present volume are reprinted from 
a volume published by the Author in 1856 under 
the title Essays Biographical and Critical : chiefly on 
English Poets. The Essays on Shelley and Keats 
are now added. Two similar volumes of revised 
Essays will follow; the next of which will be 
Chatterton: A Story of the, Year 1770. 



Edinburgh : 

April 1874. 



?o 



CONTENTS. 



L 

PAGE 
WCRDSWORTH * 1 



II. 

SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE 75 

7 

III. 

THE LIFE AND FOETRY OF SHELLEY . . 105 

IV. 

THE LIFE AND POETRT OF KEATS 143 ' 

V. 

THEORIES OF POETRY 193 

VI. 

FROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY 255 






2f 



I. 

WORDSWORTH. 



ESSAYS. 
i. 

WORDSWORTH. 1 

Another great spirit has recently gone from the midst 
of us. It is now three months since the nation heard, 
with a deep though quiet sadness, that an aged man of 
venerable mien, who for fifty years had borne worthily 
the name of English poet, had at length disappeared 
from those scenes of lake and mountain where, in 
stately care of his own worth, he had fixed his recluse 
abode, and passed forward, one star the more, into the 
still unfeatured future, whither all that lives is rolling, 
and whither, as he well knew and believed, the 
Shakespeares and Miltons, whom men count dead, had 
but as yesterday transferred their kindred radiance. 
When the news spread, it seemed as if our island were 

1 North British Review, August 1850. — "The Poetical Works of 
William Wordsworth, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, &c." London, 1849. 

B 2 



WORDSWORTH. 



suddenly a man the poorer, as if some pillar or other 
notable object, long conspicuous on its broad surface^ 
had suddenly fallen down. It is right, then, that we 
should detain our thoughts for a little in the vicinity 
of this event ; that, the worldly course of such a man 
having now been ended, we should stand for a little 
around his grave, and think solemnly of what he was. 
Neither few nor unimportant, we may be sure, are the 
reflections that should suggest themselves over the 
grave of "William Wordsworth. 

Of the various mysteries that the human mind can 
contemplate none is more baffling, and at the same time 
more charming to the understanding, than the nature of 
that law which determines the differences of power and 
mental manifestation between age and age. That all 
history is an evolution, that each generation inherits 
all that had been accumulated by its predecessor, and 
bequeathes in turn all that itself contains to its 
successor, is an idea to which, in one form or another, 
science binds us down. But, native as this idea now is 
in all cultivated minds, with how many facts, and with 
what a large proportion of our daily speech, does it not 
still stand in apparent contradiction ! Looking back 

i 

upon the past career of our race, does not the eye single 
out, as by instinct, certain epochs that are epochs of l« 
virtue and glory, and others that are epochs of frivolity 



WORDSWORTH. 



and shame ? Do we not speak of the age of Pericles 
in Greece, of the Augustan age in Kome, of the out- 
burst of chivalry in modern Europe, of the noble era 
of Elizabeth in England, and of the sad decrepitude 
that followed it ? And is there not a certain justice 
of perception in this mode of speaking ? Does it not 
seem as if all ages were not equally favoured from on 
high, gifts both moral and intellectual being vouch- 
safed to one that are all but withheld from another? 
As with individual men, so with nations and with 
humanity at large, may not the hour of highest spi- 
ritual elevation and sternest moral resolve be nearest 
the hour of most absolute obliviousness and most pro- 
found degradation ? Has not humanity also its moods 
— now brutal and full-acorned, large in physical device, 
and pregnant with the wit of unconcern ; again, 
touched to higher things, tearful for very goodness, 
turning an upward eye to the stars, and shivering to 
its smallest nerve with the power and the sense of 
beauty ? In rude and superficial expression of which 
fact, have not our literary men coined the common- 
place that a critical and sceptical age always follows 
an age of heroism and creative genius ? 

These, we say, are queries which, though they may 
not be answered to their depths, it is still useful to put 
and ponder. One remark only will we venture in con- 
nexion with them. According to one theory, it is a 



WORDSWORTH. 



sufficient explanation of these moral and intellectual 
changes in the spirit of nations to suppose that they 
take place by a law of mere contagion or propagation 
from individual to individual. One man of powerful 
and original nature, or of unusually accurate percep- 
tions, makes his appearance in some central, or, it may 
be, sequestered spot; he gains admirers or makes 
converts ; disciples gather round him, or try to form an 
opinion of him from a distance ; they, again, in their 
turn, affect others ; till, at last, as the gloom of the 
largest church is slowly changed into brilliance by the 
successive lighting of all its lamps, so a whole country 
may, district by district, succumb to the peculiarity 
of a new influence ! Now, this is perfectly true ; and 
it would be indeed difficult to estimate the amazing 
efficacy of such a law of incessant diffusion from point 
to point over a surface. But this mode of represent- 
ing the fact under notice does not convey the whole 
truth. Concerning even the silent pestilences, we have 
been recently taught that they do not wholly depend 
on transmission from individual to individual, but are 
rather distinct derangements in the body of the earth 
itself, tremors among its electricities and imponderables, 
alterations of the sum-total of those material conditions 
wherewith human life has been associated. In like 
manner, as it appears to us, must those streaming pro- 
cesses of sympathy and contagion wmereby a moral or 



WORDSWORTH. 



intellectual change is diffused over a community be 
regarded as but the superficial indications of a deep 
contemporaneous agitation pervading the whole frame 
of Nature. From the mineral core of this vast world, 
outwards to the last thoughts, impulses, and conclusions 
of us its human inhabitants, there runs, as science 
teaches, a mystic law of intercourse and affinity, 
pledging its parts to act in concert. The moral and 
intellectual revolutions of our world, its wars, its new 
philosophies, its outbursts of creative genius, its 
profligate sinkings, and its noble recoveries, all must 
rest, under the decree of supreme wisdom, on a con- 
current basis of physical undulations and vicissitudes. 
When, therefore, a man starts up in any locality, 
charged with a new spirit or a new desire, there, be 
sure, the ground around him is similarly affected. 
New intellectual dispositions are like atmospheres ; 
they overhang whole countries at once. It is not 
necessarily by communication or plagiarism that the 
thought excogitated to-day in London breaks out to- 
morrow in Edinburgh, or that persons in Gottingen and 
Oxford are found speculating at the same time in the 
same direction. In our own island, for example, it is 
a fact capable of experimental verification, that what- 
ever is being thought at any one time in any one spot, 
is, with a very small amount of difference, being 
independently thought at the same time in fifty other 



WORDSWORTH. 



places at all distances from each other. And yet it is 
equally true that in every moral or spiritual revolu- 
tion there is always a leader, a forerunner, a man of 
originality, in whose individual bosom the movement 
seems to have been rehearsed and epitomized, and that 
in the beginning of every such revolution the power of 
contagion from man to man, and the machinery of the 
clique, school, or phalanx, must come into play. 

These remarks are not too remote or abstract for 
the present occasion. The nineteenth century is a 
sufficiently large portion of historic time, England is 
a sufficiently large portion of the historic earth, and 
the poetical literature of England, or of any other 
nation, is a sufficiently important element in that 
nation's existence, to justify our viewing that remark- 
able phenomenon, the Revival of English Poetry in the 
Nineteenth Century, in the light of the most extreme 
general conceptions that can be brought to bear upon 
it. Against the preceding observations, therefore, as 
against what seems an appropriate background, let 
us try to bring out the main features of the pheno- 
menon itself, so far, at least, as these can be exhibited 
with reference to the life and writings of its most 
"representative man." And first of Wordsworth re- 
garded historically. 

From Dryden till about fifty years ago {i.e. till about 



WORDSWORTH. 



1800), say our authorities in literary history, was an 
era of poetical sterility in England. When Coleridge 
gave lectures in London on the English poets, he 
divided them into three lists or sections — the first, 
including all the poets from Chaucer to Dryden; the 
second, all those from Dryden inclusively to the close 
of the eighteenth century; and the third, all those of 
his own generation. The view presented by him of 
the characters of these three periods, relatively to each 
other, was essentially that conveyed in the strange 
theory of alternate ebb and flow, alternate immission 
and withdrawal of power, as regulating the progress 
of the universe. In other words, the first period was 
a period of strength, youth, and outburst ; the second 
was a period of cleverness, conceit, and poverty ; and 
the third was a period of revival. Eor, the poetic 
spirit being one constant thing, a certain specific and 
invariable quality or state of the human soul, not 
capable of change from century to century, but the 
same of old, now, and for ever, it. follows that the 
history of poetry can present no other appearance than 
that of alternate presence and absence, alternate excess 
and deficiency, alternate extinction and renovation. 
That is to say — accepting the poetry of Chaucer and 
Milton as true poetry, we cannot go on to defend 
the poetry of Pope and Johnson as true poetry of 
a different kind, and then, coming down to our own 



10 WORDSWORTH. 



age, assert that its poetry is true poetry of a different 
kind still. Except in a very obvious sense, rendered 
necessary by convenience, it cannot be said that there 
are kinds of poetry. The materials on which the 
poetic sense works are constantly varying; infinite, 
also, are the combinations of human faculty and will 
with which this sense may be structurally associated ; 
but the sense itself, whensoever and in whomsoever 
it may be found, is still the same old thing that 
trembled in the heart of Homer. An age may have 
it or want it ; may have more of it or less of it ; 
may have it in conjunction with this or with that 
aggregate of other characteristics ; but cannot abandon 
one form of it and take up another. 

In these remarks we have embodied a very neces- 
sary caution. If much good has been done by that 
exaltation of meaning which the words Poet and Poetry 
have received from the hands of Coleridge and others, 
as well as by their kindred services in distinguishing 
so constantly and so emphatically between the terms 
reason and understanding, genius and talent, creation 
and criticism, we are not quite sure but that, at the 
same time, this infusion of new conceptions into our 
language has been productive of some mischief. Agree- 
ing, upon the whole, with the sentence of condemnation 
which has been of late passed upon part of the poor 
eighteenth century ; believing that it was a critical, 



WORDSWORTH. 11 



negative, and nnpoetic age; nay, even believing (how- 
ever the belief is to be reconciled with the doctrine of 
continuous historic evolution) that it was one of those 
seasons of comparative diminution of the general vital 
energy of our species which we have already spoken 
of: — we still think that too sweeping a use has been 
made of this notion and its accessories by a certain 
class of writers. Let us illustrate our meaning by an 
example. Keats, the poet, and James Mill, the his- 
torian of India, were contemporaries. The one, ac- 
cording to the language introduced by Coleridge, was 
a man v of genius; the other was a man of talent. In 
the soul of Keats, if ever in a human soul at all, there 
was a portion of the real poetic essence — the real 
faculty divine; Mr. Mill, on the other hand, had 
probably as little of the poet in his* composition as any 
celebrated man of his time, but he was a man of hard 
metal, of real intellectual strength, and of unyielding 
rectitude. In certain exercises of the mind he could 
probably have crushed Keats, who was no weakling, as 
easily as a giant could crush a babe. But, suppose the 
two men to have sat together on Hampstead Heath in 
a starry night, which of them would then have been 
the stronger — which would have known the more 
ecstatic pulses ? Or, to make the case still more 
decisive, suppose the two men to have been Keats and 
Aristotle — Keats a consumptive poetic boy, and Aristotle 



12 WORDSWORTH. 



the intellect of half a world. Does not such a contrast 
bring out the real injustice that has been done to 
many truly great and good men by the habit which, 
since the time of Coleridge, has become general, of 
placing all the men that belong to the so-called 
category of genius in one united mass above all that 
rank only in the category of talent ? For, though we 
may grant the reality of some such distinction as is 
implied between the two substantives, is it not clear 
that the general mass of mind possessed by a man 
reputed to belong to the inferior category, and con- 
sequently his general power to influence the soul of 
the world, may exceed a thousand times that possessed 
by a man of the other ? In other words, may not a 
man rank so high in the one kind that, even though 
the kind itself be inferior, it may be said with truth 
that he is a hundred times greater a man than some 
specified lower man in the other? Practically, the 
tenor of these remarks is that we are in the present 
day committing an injustice by following the tendency 
of our young Coleridgians to restrict the meaning of 
the quantitative word "greatness" within the limits 
of the merely qualitative word " genius." And, specu- 
latively, their tenor may be expressed in the proposition 
that this quality or mode of mind called genius, the 
poetic sense, creative power, and so on, may exist in 
association with all possible varieties of intellectual 



WORDSWORTH. 13 



or cerebral vigour, from the mediocrity of a Kirke 
White or an Anacreon, up to the stupendousness of a 
Shakespeare. It is thus that, while agreeing in the 
main with the opinion that from Dryden to the close 
of the next hundred years was a poetic interregnum, 
we would still make our peace with those who would 
fight the battle of the much-abused eighteenth century, 
and would steer clear of the controversy whether Pope 
was a poet. As deficiency in poetic power does not 
imply corresponding deficiency in what may be called 
ordinary cerebral vigour, so the eighteenth century, 
though admitted to have been unpoetic, may have been 
a very respectable century notwithstanding ; and, even 
were we to exclude Pope from the class of poets (which 
most certainly we would not do), we might still hold 
him to have been a phenomenon in literature not, on 
that account, a whit the less remarkable. A deeper 
analysis would carry us farther into the question as 
to the connexion between poetic power and general 
intellect in individuals and in ages ; but here we 
must stop, v 

Having thus explained in what sense we understand 
that general assertion regarding the low state of English 
poetry in the eighteenth century (part of the seven- 
teenth included) with which the name of Wordsworth 
is irrevocably associated, let us attend a little to the 
facts of the case. In what did the sterility of English 



14 WORDSWORTB.. 



poetry in that age consist, and what words would best 
describe it? Here Wordsworth himself comes to our 
aid. The following is from an Appendix to the Pre- 
face to the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads, pub- 
lished in 1800 : the subject under discussion is Poetic 
Diction: — 

" The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote 
from passion excited by real events ; they wrote natu- 
rally and as men : feeling powerfully as they did, their 
language was daring and figurative. In succeeding 
times, poets, and men ambitious of the fame of poets, 
perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous 
of producing the same effect without being animated 
with the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical 
adoption of these figures of speech, and made use of 
them sometimes with propriety, but much more fre- 
quently applied them to feelings and thoughts with 
which they had no natural connexion whatsoever. A 
language was thus insensibly produced, differing mate- 
rially from the real language of men in any situation. 
The reader or hearer of this distorted language found 
himself in a perturbed and unusual state of mind : 
when affected by the genuine language of passion he 
had been in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also : 
in both cases he was willing that his common judgment 
and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no 
instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make 
him reject the false; the one served as a passport for 
the other. The emotion was in both cases delightful ; 
and no wonder if he confounded the one with the 



WORDSWORTH. 15 



other, and believed them both to be produced by the 
same or similar causes. Besides, the poet spake to him 
in the character of a man to be looked up to, a man of 
genius and authority. Thus, and from a variety of 
other causes, this distorted language was received with 
admiration; and poets, it is probable, who had before 
contented themselves for the most part with misapplying 
only expressions which at first had been dictated by 
real passion, carried the abuse still further, and intro- 
duced phrases composed apparently in the spirit of the 
original figurative language of passion, yet altogether 
of their own invention, and characterised by various 
degrees of wanton deviation from good sense and 
nature. . . . Perhaps in no way, by positive example, 
could be more easily given a notion of what I mean by 
the phrase poetic diction than by referring to a compari- 
son between the metrical paraphrases which we have of 
passages in the Old and New Testament and those 
passages as they exist in our common Translation. . . . 
By way of immediate example, take the following of 
Dr. Johnson : — 

' Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes, 
Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise ; 
~No stern command, no monitory voice, 
Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice ; 
Yet, timely provident, she hastes away 
To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day ; 
When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain, 
She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain* 
How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, 
Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers ? 



16 WORDSWORTH. 



While artful shades thy downy couch enclose, 
And soft solicitation courts repose, 
Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, 
Year chases year with unremitted flight, 
Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow. 
Shall spring to seize thee, like an anibush'd foe.' 

From this hubbub of words pass to the original. { Go 
to the Ant, thou Sluggard, consider her ways and be 
wise : which, having no guide, overseer, or ruler, pro- 
videth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food 
in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, Sluggard ? 
when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep ? Yet a little 
sleep, yet a little slumber, a little folding of the hands 
to sleep ! So shall thy poverty come as one that 
travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.' 



» )> 



To sum up the views thus presented by Wordsworth 
of the state of English poetry after Milton, it may be 
said that at that time the nation, having lost much of 
the genuine poetical power it had formerly possessed, 
but still preserving a form of composition to which it 
had been so long and so powerfully accustomed, began 
to regard the essence of poetry as lying in metre, 
accompanied by a certain peculiar and artificial phrase- 
ology called poetic diction, thus begetting that exag- 
gerated antithesis between poetry and prose with which 
our language is still infected. Instead of regarding the 
poetic faculty as consisting in a mode or attitude of the 
mind, distinguishable, on the one hand, from the scientific 



WORDSWORTH. 17 



mode or attitude, whose function is investigation or 
exposition, and, on the other hand, from the oratorical 
mode or attitude, whose function is to excite or stimulate 
in a particular direction, they* made poetry to consist 
in a mode of language, and they estimated the value 
of a poet according to the degree of mastery he had 
attained in the use of this mode of language, and the 
degree of general mental power and resource he could 
manifest through it. Hence, in the first place, a gradual 
increase of departure in metrical composition from the 
idioms and combinations of words deemed appropriate 
to prose ; and, in the second place, a gradual reduction 
of the range of metre itself to certain fixed varieties 
and methods of versification, which the older poets, 
who did not so much assort their thoughts to rhymes 
as let the thoughts flow out in their own rhythm, 
would have disdained as much as a natural cascade 
would disdain the assistance of pipes. But, while an 
exaggerated antithesis was thus established between 
prose and poetry, it by no means followed that a very 
wide separation was drawn between the devotees of the 
one and those of the other. Poetry was indeed a 
different form of diction from prose ; but then, as it 
was not difficult for a clever man to acquire two forms 
of diction, one might very well be both a poet and a 
prose-writer ! To pass from prose to poetry was but to 
pass from one's town to one's country house. Hence it 

c 



18 WORDSWORTH. 



was that so many of the literary men of last century 
had a reputation both in prose and in verse. General 
mental vigour carried an author triumphantly through 
either form of composition. Wit, sarcasm, strength, 
manliness, whatever qualities of intellect or disposition 
could earn respect for a writer in prose, were all capable 
— with a little training, or a slight native impulse 
towards the picturesque, to aid him — of being transfused 
into metre. The best poetry of the age was, accordingly, 
rather wit or reflection expressed in metre than real 
poetry in the strict sense of the word. And here lies 
the defence of the poets of that time, as well as their 
condemnation. Of many of them it may be denied 
that they were poets ; but of almost all of them it may 
be asserted that they were men of general mental 
vigour. In our disquisitions concerning them, there- 
fore, let not this be forgotten. If Johnson was no poet, 
he was a very ponderous and noble old sage never- 
theless ; and even the purists that would clip the laurels 
of Dry den and Pope must admit that now-a-days we 
have no such manly literati as the former about 
Leicester Square, and that the other was a diamond 
of the first water. 

But the change came at length. By the mysterious 
operation of those laws which determine the risings 
and the sinkings of the mental state of humanity as 
a whole, there seemed to be effected, towards the close 



WORDSWORTH. 19 



of the eighteenth century, a sudden increase of the 
vital energy of the species. Humanity assumed a 
higher mood ; a deep agitation, as if from a fresh 
electric discharge out of celestial space into the solid 
body of our planet, shook the soul of the world, and 
left it troubled and excited. The two most conspicuous 
and extensive manifestations of this heightened state 
of the world's consciousness were — in the region of 
speculation, the promulgation of the Transcendental 
Philosophy in Germany, and, in the region of action, 
the French Eevolution. But, as if the same spirit 
which burst forth in these two great eruptions also 
sought vent through smaller and apparently uncon- 
nected orifices all over Europe, there were not wanting 
other significant indications of the change that was 
taking place. In Germany, seemingly apart from 
the Transcendental Philosophy, though in reality de- 
riving strength from it through a subterranean conduit, 
a new Literature came forth, under the care first of 
Lessing, and then of Goethe. And in our own country, 
sprinkled over as it had been in spots by the sound 
and fertile philosophy of Eeid, there was a feebler 
exhibition of the same phenomenon. Even in the age 
of reputed degeneracy there had been men of the true 
poetic spark. Dryden and Pope may not have kept 
it pure, but they assuredly had it; Gray, notwith- 
standing the dreadful disintegration to which his Elegy 

c 2 



20 WORDSWOETH 



has been submitted by modern critics, did certainly 
possess the ear and sensibility of a poet ; Collins and 
Goldsmith were men of musical hearts ; and Thomson, 
Wordsworth himself being judge, was a genuine child 
of rural nature. Nor here, whatever other names are left 
unmentioned, let him be forgotten, the boy of Bristol, 
the drunken choir-singer's posthumous son, who was 
found dead in his garret in Brooke Street, Holborn, 
on the 25th of August, 1770. But the real poetic 
outburst came after these men had been removed from 
the scene, and was plainly a consequence of that 
general commotion of the earth to which we have 
referred. Its earliest unmistakeable signs may be said 
to have been given in the works of Cowper and Burns. 
In the bard of Olney, invalid as he was, the new force 
found an English mind that it could compel to speak 
for it; and, when the swarthy Scottish ploughman 
filled the Lowlands with his songs, it was clear that 
the process of reformation had been completed, as 
regarded this island, to its last spontaneous results, 
and that every acre of the British earth had become 
instinct and pregnant with the novel fire. 

Accordingly, this was the period of the birth and 
training of new English poets. Crabbe, Scott, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Southey, were children of this 
period ; and in all of them — their peculiar differences 
allowed for to the utmost — the new spirit was visible. 



WORDSWORTH. 21 



It was assigned to Wordsworth, however, more than 
to any other man, to be conscious of the fact that 
such a new spirit had been breathed into the world 
at all, and to conclude the process of its diffusion 
through society by bringing into play the powers of 
theoretical exposition through the press and personal 
influence over distinguished contemporaries. 

Born among the Cumberland hills, in the year 1770 — 
that is, in the year of Chatterton's death — Wordsworth 
was but eleven years younger than Burns. It is 
pleasant to think that these two men, though they 
never met, were near neighbours. From within half 
a mile of Burns's house at Ellisland, the Cumberland 
mountains may be seen ; and since the days of Drayton 
the Scottish Scruffel and the English Skiddaw have 
recognised each other in popular verse. Wordsworth 
himself, on visiting the land of Burns, called this 
fact to mind : — 

" Huge Criffei's hoary top ascends, 
By Skiddaw seen, — 
Neighbours we were, and loving friends 



*o J 



We might have been." 



*t> 



When Burns died, at the age of thirty-seven, Words- 
worth was a young man of twenty-six. He had been 
destined for the Church, and with that view had gone 
to St. John's College, Cambridge, and taken his degree ; 



22 WORDSWORTH. 



but, caught as he had been from the first by the new 
spirit of song, then hanging most powerfully, as it 
would seem, over both shores of the Solway, he had 
already recognised his proper office, and consecrated 
his life to the Muses. In 1793, the year of the publi- 
cation by Burns of the fourth edition of his Poems, 
Wordsworth had given to the world his first produc- 
tions — two poems in the heroic couplet, entitled, 
respectively, An Evening Walk, addressed to a Young 
Lady, and Descriptive Sketches, taken during a pedes- 
trian Tour among the Alps. These two compositions 
are slender enough; but how powerful was the im- 
pression that they produced on some minds by the 
peculiarity of their style may be inferred from the 
following testimony of another youthful poet, who, 
coming to Cambridge immediately after Wordsworth 
had left it, naturally took an interest in what his 
predecessor had done. " During the last year of my 
residence at Cambridge," says Coleridge, "I became 
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, 
entitled Descriptive Sketches ; and seldom, if ever, was 
the emergence of an original poetic genius above the 
literary horizon more evidently announced." It was 
not till 1796, however, that the two poets became 
personally known to each other. Like Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, who had travelled, and resided in France 
during the fervours of the French Revolution, partook, 



WORDSWORTH. 23 



and in no moderate degree, of the social enthusiasm 
of the time ; and, the two aspirants having gone to 
live together for a summer in a pleasant retreat on the 
coast of Somersetshire, their demeanour, as Coleridge 
informs us in his Biographia Ziteraria, attracted so 
much local attention that Government was induced 
to send a spy to watch them. The poor man, however, 
after dogging them for some weeks in their walks, 
acquitted them of any disloyal intention, and even 
became ashamed of his office, feeling sure, as he said ; 
from their continual talking of one Spy-Nosy, as they 
sat together for hours on a sandbank, behind which 
he lay concealed, that they had detected him, and 
were making game of him. As Wordsworth's tempo- 
rary sympathies with the French Eevolution may be 
supposed to have placed him in vital connexion with 
one of the two great phenomena in which the sudden 
access of new energy to the human race at that time 
declared itself, so, we may also suppose, those sea-side 
conversations of his about Spy-Nosy with the " notice- 
able man with large grey eyes" must have placed 
him in sufficient connexion with the other pheno- 
menon, the Transcendental Philosophy. Moreover, 
in 1798, the two friends made a tour together in 
Germany; and whatever speculative insight was 
obtained by Coleridge during his whole life was 
evidently communicated, if not in the form of creed, 



24 WORDSWORTH. 



at least in the form of conception, to the less analytic 
poet, v 

In 1798 Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads ; 
to the second edition of which, printed in 1800, he 
appended his first prose exposition of those principles 
on which he professed to write, and to which Coleridge, 
by the fact of his association with him in the publi- 
cation (the Ancient 'Mariner appeared in companion- 
ship with the Lyrical Ballads), virtually gave in his 
adhesion. Wordsworth's next publication was in 1807, 
when he printed in two volumes a variety of poems 
composed in preceding years. Meanwhile he had 
married, and had retired to his native Lakes, to lead 
among their quiet beauties the tranquil life he deemed 
alone suitable to the poetic nature. Southey's subse- 
quent retirement to the same part of the country, 
and Coleridge's frequent visits to it, gave occasion 
to the celebrated nickname of the " Lake School," 
applied to the three poets and their followers. With the 
exception of a few tours in Scotland and the Conti- 
nent, and occasional journeys to London, the whole 
remainder of Wordsworth's long life was spent among 
the Lakes. Here, in the enjoyment of worldly compe- 
tence, he walked, boated, wrote, and attended church ; 
hence from time to time he issued his new poems, or 
collections of poems, accompanied by prefaces or disser- 
tations intended to illustrate their peculiar character : 



WORDSWORTH. 2-5 



and here, in the bosom of his admiring family, he 
received the chance visits of such stray worshippers as 
came privileged with letters of introduction, talking 
with them in a cold stately way, and not unfrequently 
(be the truth distinctly spoken) shocking them by the 
apparent egotism with which he referred to or quoted 
his own poetry, the inordinate indifference he displayed 
towards most things besides, the painful rigour with 
which he exacted from those around him every outward 
mark of respect and attention, and the seriousness with 
which he would repeat the most insignificant words 
that had been uttered in his praise. These particulars 
regarding the man are already irrevocably before the 
public in our books of literary gossip, and may not, 
therefore, be wholly omitted even in a notice dedicated 
to the poet. But, whatever may have been his bearing 
in the presence of other men, Wordsworth was modest 
and cordial in his communion with Nature. And it is 
thus that we should remember him : not as the pleasant 
ornament of the social board, lavishing the kind word 
and the hearty repartee; not as the self-forgetting 
enthusiast of the hour, burning his way through crowds, 
and drawing adoration and love in his train ; but as he 
was in his old age, the conscious patriarch of English 
poesy, the grey-haired and hard-featured recluse, shun- 
ning the haunts of men, yet with a benevolent hand 
for the familiar woes of trie neighbourhood which knew 



26 WORDSWOBTR. 



and honoured him, accustomed to walk alone by day 
amid the woods, to pace muttering by the ripple of a 
lake in the moonlight, or, standing half way up a 
mountain, to turn his unearthly eye towards the heaven 
of stars. Such he was through all the turmoil of a 
generation into which, almost alone of his coevals, he 
had lived to advance ; and such he was till, in his 
eighty-first year, death took him. 

The nature of the revolution effected by Wordsworth 
in the state of English poetry will be best understood 
by attending to the exact tenor of certain propositions 
advanced and illustrated by him in his various Prefaces 
and Dissertations between 1800 and 1820. On these 
propositions, as supplementary to his general critical 
onslaught on the poetry of the previous age, he may be 
supposed to have rested his claims to be considered not 
only a poet, but also the father of a new poetical era. 

Poetry, according to Wordsworth, "takes its origin 
from emotion recollected in tranquillity: " what the poet 
chiefly does, or ought to do, is to represent, out of real 
life, scenes and passions of an affecting or exciting 
character. Now, men originally placed in such scenes 
use a nervous and exquisite language, expressly adapted 
for the occasion by Nature herself; and the poet, 
therefore, in imitating such scenes or passions, will 
recall them more vividly in proportion as he can 



WORDSWORTH. 27 



succeed in employing the same language. Only one 
consideration should operate to make him modify that 
language : the consideration, namely, that his business 
as a poet is to give pleasure. All such words or ex- 
pressions, therefore, as, though natural in the original 
transaction of a passionate scene, would be unpleasant 
in its poetic rehearsal, must be omitted. Pruned and 
weeded in accordance with this negative rule, any 
description of a moving occurrence, whether in prose 
or verse, would be true poetry. But, to secure still 
more perfectly their great end of giving pleasure while v. 
they excite emotion, poets have devised the artificial 
assistance of metre or verse. The rationale of the use 
of metre consists in this, that it provides for the reader 
or hearer a succession of minute pleasurable surprises, 
apart from, and independent of, the emotion produced 
by the matter for which it is the vehicle. A prose 
version of a passionate story, though, if well managed, 
it would not be so painful as the original transaction, 
and might even be pleasurable, would still in many 
cases be sufficiently painful to prevent its being read 
more than once. But, by narrating the same in metre, 
the poet is able, as it were, cunningly to administer a 
series of doses of pleasure, artificially prepared, which, 
though not very perceptible, are still sufficient, by 
mingling with the current of the meaning, to attemper 
and sweeten its effects. And rhyme is a still higher 



25 WORDSWORTH. 



form of the same device. The necessities, therefore, of 
metre and rhyme do oblige certain departures in poetry 
from the primary language of emotion; but, with 
allowance for these, good poetic diction should still 
approach very near to the language of real life. 

This view, so useful as an attack upon the florid 
diction of the poets of the preceding age, certainly errs 
by exaggeration. Wordsworth's own poetry will not 
stand to be tried by it ; for, as Coleridge has shown, 
there is hardly a verse, even in his most simple 
productions, that does not deviate from the so-called 
language of real life. And it must inevitably be so. 
For, in the first place, the mere application of the 
negative principle of modification laid down by Words- 
worth would amount to an abandonment of the point 
at issue. Eemove all that would be poetically un- 
pleasant from the language of real passion in humble 
life — the bad grammar, the incoherence, the mispro- 
nunciations, and so on; and the language that would 
then be left for the poet would be a very rare and 
select language indeed, existing literally nowhere 
throughout the community, but purely supposititious 
and ideal, the sap and flower of all popular expression. 
So also with the representation of passions of a higher 
order. The only sense in which the language of a 
great part of our best poetry can be said to resemble 
real language is that it is the kind of language that 



WORDSWORTH. 29 



a few of the most cultured persons of the community 
would employ on very rare and impressive occasions. 
But even the choicest spontaneous language of the 
best minds when most nobly moved in real life must 
undergo modification before it can be used by the 
poet. And, though Wordsworth has provided for such 
modification, by laying down the positive principle 
that the poet is at all times to remember that it is 
his office to give pleasure, and by pointing out the 
operation of this principle as regards metre and rhyme, 
yet he does not seem to have seen the whole energy 
of this principle as determining and compelling de- 
partures from common usage. His argument for the 
virtual identity of poetic language and the language 
of real life reminds one of the mania for what is called 
a simple conversational style. Why do not men write 
as they speak? Why do they not convey their 
meaning in books in the good racy English which 
they employ at the dinner-table, or when giving their 
household orders ? Such are the absurd questions that 
are asked every day. It never seems to enter into the 
minds of these people that conversation is one thing, 
public speaking another, and writing a third ; that 
each involves and requires a distinct setting of the 
faculties for its exercise ; that in passing from one to 
either of the others certain powers must be called into 
play that were before at rest, or sent to rest that were 



30 WORDSWORTH. 



before in play; and that, accordingly, to demand the 
perpetual use of a conversational style is to insist that 
there shall never be anything greater in the world 
than what conversation can generate. But a world 
thus restricted to the merely conversational method of 
literary production would fall into decrepitude. When 
a man talks with his friend, he is led on but by a 
few trains of association, and finds a straggling style 
natural for his purposes ; when he speaks in public, 
the wheels of thought glow, the associative processes 
by which he advances become more complex, and hence 
the roll, the cadence, the precipitous burst ; and, lastly, 
when he writes, still other conditions of thought come 
into action, and there arises the elaborate sentence, 
winding like a rivulet through the meadow of his 
subject, or the page jewelled with a thousand allusions. 
Precisely so in the matter more immediately under 
discussion. Here, too, there is a gradation. A man 
in a state of excitement talks in vivid language, and 
even sets his words to a rough natural music, his voice 
swelling or trembling with its burthen, though falling 
short of song. But in the literary repetition of a 
scene Nature suggests a new set of proprieties, answer- 
ing to the entire difference between the mind in the 
primary and the mind in the secondary attitude ; 
and a literal report would be found to defeat the 
very end in view, and to be as much out of place 



WORDSWORTH. 31 



as a literal copy in painting. Even in prose nar- 
ration there mnst be a more select and coherent 
language than served in the primary act of passion, 
as well as a more melodious music. And when, moved 
to a still higher flight, the story lifts itself into 
metre — availing itself of a device sanctioned by an 
origin in some of the more splendid moments of the 
ancient human soul — then, in exchange for certain 
advantages, it submits to restrictions that come along 
with them. Finally, if the charm of rhyme be desired, 
this too must be purchased by farther and inevitable 
concessions. Thus, we repeat, there is a gradation. 
In prose narration language is conditioned by a more 
complex set of necessities than in actual experience ; 
in metrical narration the conditions are more complex 
still, so that, if the speech were of marble before, there 
must now be speech of jasper ; and, lastly, in rhyme 
the conditions compel the thought through so fine a 
passage that the words it chooses must be opals and 
rubies. Nor in all this is there any departure from 
nature. On the contrary, it is a fine provision that, 
where the ordinary resources even of musical prose 
are apt to fail, the mind should have more intense 
methods of production in reserve. Such methods 
are metre and rhyme. They do not impair the work 
of intellectual invention, but rather assist it, and render 
it capable of a more exquisite class of performances 



32 WORDSWORTH. 



than would otherwise be possible. In prose, however 
musical, the meaning flows easily over a level, obeying 
the guidance of its own associations ; in metre new 
associations are added, which, while they increase the 
difficulty, also stimulate the intellect to higher reaches ; 
and, when with this is conjoined rhyme, or the obliga- 
tion of conducting the already moving thought in the 
direction or towards the horizon of a certain possible 
number of preconceived sounds, then every fibre of 
the mind is alert, the whole strength of the house- 
hold is in action, and things are done that surprise the 
gods. 

Although there seems to be no doubt that the vehe- 
ment opposition that greeted Wordsworth on his appear- 
ance as a poet was determined largely by a perception 
on the part of the public of those weaknesses in his 
theory to which we have been alluding, it seems plain 
also that much of it was a mere display of that instinct 
of indignation which seizes men when they see their 
household deities attacked. 

" c Pedlars,' and ' boats,' and ' waggons ! ' Oh ! ye shades 
Of Pope and Dry den, are we come to this ? " 

Such was the universal feeling of the critics. The 
controversy between the Edinburgh Review and Words- 
worth was literally a contest between the old and the 
new; in which, however, the old derived certain advan- 



WORDSWORTH. 33 



tages from the obstinacy and want of tact with which 
the new exposed and made a boast of its most galling 
peculiarities. For, if Jeffrey's criticisms on Words- 
worth's poetry be now compared with the criticisms 
of Wordsworth's own friend Coleridge, as published 
in the Biographia, Lileraria, it will be found that, 
immeasurably as the two critics differ in spirit — 
the one refusing to admit Wordsworth to be a good 
poet at all, the other considering him to be the greatest 
English poet since Milton — there is still an almost 
perfect coincidence in their special objections to his 
style. What Jeffrey attacked was chiefly the alleged 
childishness of much of Wordsworth's language, the 
babyism of his " Alice Fells," with their cloaks of 
" duffle grey," &c. ; and it is precisely on these points 
that Coleridge, even while aware of his friend's more 
profound reason for such familiarities, expresses his 
dissent from him. The truth is, had Wordsworth been 
a man of more innate energy, more tremendousness, as 
a poet, he would have effected the revolution that was 
necessary with less delay and opposition. Wrapping up 
his doctrinal peculiarities, if he had had any, in the 
midst of his poetry, instead of protruding them in a 
preface, he would have blasted the old spirit out by 
the mere infatuation of the new, and wound resistless 
hands in the hair of the nation's instincts. But, 
instead of being the Mirabeau of the literary revolu- 



34 WORDSWORTH. 



tion, hardly aware of his own propositions, he was, as 
it were, its Eobespierre, who first threw his propositions 
tied in a bunch into the crowd before him, and then 
fought his way pertinaciously to where they fell. Even 
thus (and there were doubtless advantages in this 
method too) he at length obtained success. The " This 
will never do " with which Jeffrey introduced his criti- 
cism of the Excursion proved a false augury. Slowly 
and reluctantly the nation came round to Wordsworth ; 
and, if there are still many that believe in his defects 
and shortcomings, all admit him to have been a true 
poet, and a man of rare genius. Of the poets that have 
appeared in England since he began his course — Byron, 
Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and others — there is not one 
that does not owe something to his example and in- 
fluence. Not that these men would not have been 
poets even had Wordsworth never lived. Through 
them, too, the new spirit would infallibly in any case 
have asserted itself; and, as it is, there has been in 
each of them something individual and original, which 
has caught portions of the new spirit that even the 
soul of Wordsworth did not, and been made capable 
thereby of perfectly specific work. A Nestor may be 
the patriarch of the camp, but even his deeds may be, 
in the end, outdone by the exploits of younger heroes. 
Of all the poets that have succeeded Wordsworth, the 
one who stands most in the position of revolt against 



WORDSWORTH. 35 



him is Byron. The Byronic in poetry is, in some 
respects, the contradictory of the Wordsworthian. And 
believing that Byron was also a great poet, and that 
through him there were poured into our age elements 
of grandeur and power that were wanting in Words- 
worth, and yet were needed, one would willingly go on 
to consider historically the appearance of this other 
tendency in our literature, known as the Byronic, and 
to show how the two tributaries became at length 
united. It is time, however, to leave the historical 
part of our subject, and direct our attention more 
expressly to the qualities of Wordsworth as a poet. 

That Wordsworth was a true poet, that he did possess 
the "inherent glow," the "vision and faculty divine," 
no one that has ever read a page of his writings can 
honestly deny. Coleridge, in whose vocabulary the 
word " imagination " stood for the poetic faculty par 
excellence, pronounced Wordsworth to be, in imaginative 
power, " the nearest of all modern writers to Shake- 
speare and Milton." This estimate may be opposed by 
some as too high; but, if we keep in view the precise sense 
attached by Coleridge to his words, it will be difficult 
to lower it very much. Nor, in accepting such a judg- 
ment, is it necessary to have any profound theory as 
to the nature of this so-called imaginative or poetic 
faculty which we then assert him to possess. It is 

d 2 



36 WORDSWORTH. 



sufficient if we know it when we see it, or if we feel 
the force of any of those numerous synonyms and cir- 
cumlocutions by which poets and analysts (Wordsworth 
himself amongst others) have sought to describe it. 
For, as some think, we define such terms best when we 
rave about them, adhering to no one form of expression, 
but supplementing the defects of all possible conception 
by the vagueness and the force of sound. Perhaps the 
phrase which, if fully apprehended, would best convey 
the notion of what is meant by imagination as the 
faculty of the poet, would be the phrase "creative 
energy." For this phrase would carry with it one very 
essential discrimination — the discrimination, namely, 
of the poetic faculty, as such, both from that passive 
sensibility by which the mind, presenting a photo- 
graphic surface to the universe, receives from it 
impressions of whatever is, and also from that minor 
and more ordinary exercise of activity by which the 
mind, sitting thereafter amid these received impressions, 
reeollects, registers, and compares them. "What the 
imaginative or poetic faculty does is something beyond 
this, and is more akin to the operation of that original 
cosmic power at whose fiat the atoms and the ele- 
ments sprang first together. A certain accumulation 
of material, a certain assemblage of impressions, or 
mental objects, being supplied by the consciousness, 
and lying there ready, it is the part of this faculty to 



WORDSWORTH. 37 



discharge into them a self that shall fuse them into a 
living whole, capable of being contemplated with plea- 
sure. This — the poiesis or creation of new unities, the 
information of mere knowledge with somewhat of the 
spirit of the knower, the incorporation of diverse im- 
pressions and recollections by the combining flash of a 
specific mental act — is the function of the imagination. 
Now, as all men possess this faculty in some degree, 
and as in the generation of all the higher species of 
thought or action it must be present in a very large 
degree, by whatever names such species of thought 
or action are called, it is only in a certain supreme sense 
that imagination is set apart in all languages as the 
proper faculty of poets. Yet there is reason in this. 
Poets pre-eminently are men that breathe their own 
spirit into things, that make self dominate over what is 
distinct from self, that give out into the universe more 
than they receive from it. So in Goethe's lines on the 
poet — 

" Wherewith bestirs he human spirits ? 
Wherewith makes he the elements obey ? 
Is't not the stream of song that out his bosom springs, 
And to his heart the world back coiling brings ? " 

That is, the stream of song, or self, flowing forth from 
the poet's heart into the world of phenomena, entwines 
itself there with this and with that portion of matter 



38 WOBDSWOBTH. 



or experience, and then flows back to whence it came, 
coiling what it has captured along with it. This power, 
this overflowing of self upon the universe, so character- 
istic of the poet, appears most of all in his eye. The 
eyes of some men are dull and obtuse ; those of others 
are sharp and piercing, as if they shot their power out 
in lines ; the eyes of the poet are heavy-laden and 
melancholy, like pools continually too full. 

However we may choose to vary the words that are 
taken to define the essential faculty of the poet, we 
shall find that they apply to Wordsworth. Every page 
of his poetry abounds with instances of imagination. 
Thus, from the Excursion — 

" Some tall crag 
That is the eagle's birth-place, or some peak 
Familiar with forgotten years, that shows 
Inscribed upon its visionary sides 
The history of many a winter-storm, 
Or obscure record of the path of fire." 

Or from Peter Bell — 

"And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales, 
Among the rocks and winding scars ; 

Where deep and low the hamlets lie 

Beneath their Utile patch of sky, 
And little lot of stars!' 

Or from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections 
of Childhood — 



WORDSWORTH. 39 



" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar : 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God who is our home : 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy ; 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows — 

He sees it in his joy; 
The Youth, who daily further from the east 
Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 
And by the vision splendid 
Is on his way attended ; 
At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day." 

These, and hundreds of other passages that might be 
quoted, show that Wordsworth possessed, in a very high 
degree indeed, the true primary quality of the poet — 
imagination ; a surcharge of personality or vital spirit, 
perpetually overflowing among the objects of the other- 
wise conditioned universe, and refashioning them accor- 
ding to its pleasure. 

If we proceed now to inquire what were the most 
prominent of those other characteristics which, acting 
and re-acting with this generic tendency in the economy 
of Wordsworth's mind, determined the specific pecu- 



40 WORDSWORTH. 



liarities of his poetical productions, we are sure to be 
impressed first of all by his extreme sensibility to, and 
accurate acquaintance with, the changing phenomena 
of external nature. It is a just complaint against 
civilization, as that word is at present defined, and 
especially against life in cities, that men are thereby 
shut out, or rather shut in, from sources of sensation 
the most pure and healthy of any. That people should 
know something of the aspects of the earth they live 
on ; that they should be familiar with the features of at 
least a portion of its undisguised surface, with its rocks, 
its woods, its turf, its hills, as seen in the varying 
lights of day and night, and the varying livery of the 
seasons : this, it may be said, was clearly intended to 
be for ever a part of the mere privilege of existence. 
But a large proportion of mankind have been obliged 
to let slip even this poor item of their right in being. 
Pent up, on the one hand, in their cares against starva- 
tion, and, on the other, in their devices for artificial 
comfort, men have ceased to regard, with the same true 
intimacy as of old, the venerable face of their ancient 
* mother. Certain great admonitions of the outward, 
indeed, will always remain with men wheresoever they 
pass their days— the overarching sky, the midnight 
winds, the sea's expanse, the yellow cornfield, the 
wooded landscape. And, after all, these are the images 
of nature that have most power to stir and affect us : 



WORDSWORTH. 41 



these, of which not even cities can deprive ns. Cities, 
too, have their own peculiar kinds of scenery, of which, 
and especially of their nocturnal aspects, enough has 
not yet been made. Thus, in Keats's Lamia — 

" As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, 
Throughout her palaces imperial, 
And all her populous streets and temples lewd, 
Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, 
To the wide-spreaded night above her towers."' 

But of the rural minutiw of Nature, and also of what 
may be called her aspects of the horrible and lone- 
some, most of us, above all if we are denizens of 
cities, are compelled to be ignorant. Very few, for 
example, can tell the names of the various forest trees, 
or distinguish them from each other ; and fewer still 
can recognise, either by name or association, the 
various wild-flowers that grow in the meadows. How 
much also of sympathy with nature have we not lost 
by not knowing, with the shepherd or husbandman, the 
signs of the weather : what the clouds say when they 
hurry so, what mean those motions of the cattle, and 
why the mists roll down the hills 1 And then, in 
the more special region of phenomena to which we 
have referred, who among us experience, save by rare 
chance, the realities of those scenes so tellirfg in books 
of fiction — the dark and solitary moor with the light 
glimmering in the distance, the fearful bivouac in the 



42 WORDSWORTH. 



depths of a wood, or the incessant breaking of the 
waves at midnight against the cliff-embattled shore ? 
Now, it is a curious fact that one of the most cha- 
racteristic features of that revolution in English 
poetry with which the name of Wordsworth is asso- 
ciated has been the increased interest that it has both 
instinctively aroused and knowingly cultivated in the 
facts and appearances of material nature. If, as Words- 
worth himself has said, hardly a new original image or 
description of nature was introduced into English verse 
in the age between Milton and Thomson, our recent 
poets have certainly retrieved the neglect. "Nature, 
nature," has been their cry ; and as Bacon, after his 
lordly fashion of thought, fancied that it was of service 
to his health and spirits to inhale every morning the 
smell of freshly-ploughed earth into which he had 
poured wine, so they have interpreted literally their 
prescriptions to the same effect, by renewing as often 
as possible their acquaintance with the rural earth, and 
falling periodically on the turf, as it were, with their 
faces downwards. In particular, it must have been 
remarked what an increased familiarity our recent 
poets have contracted with the botanical department 
of nature. Chaucer himself could hardly have described 
the beauties of a field or a garden more minutely than 
some of our modern versifiers. Nor among the poets 
that have helped to cultivate this delight in the obser- 



WORDSWORTH. 43 



vation of natural appearances is there anyone that 
deserves to be ranked before Wordsworth. A native 
of scenes celebrated for their loveliness, he seems to 
have been endowed from the first with a capacity to 
feel and appreciate their benignant influence. In one 
of the few fragments that have been yet given to the 
world of his unpublished poem, The Prelude, he thus 
describes his sympathy with nature in childhood : — 

" In November days, 
When vapours rolling down the valleys made 
A lonely scene more lonesome ; among woods 
At noon ; and 'mid the calm of summer nights, 
When, by the margin of the trembling lake, 
Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went 
In solitude, such intercourse was mine : 
Mine was it in the fields, both day and night, 
And by the waters, all the summer long. 
And in the frosty season, when the sun 
Was set, and, visible for many a mile, 
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, 
I heeded not the summons : happy time 
It was indeed for all of us ; for me 
It was a time of rapture ! . . . Shod with steel 
We hissed along the polished ice, in games 
Confederate, imitative of the chase 
And woodland pleasures— the resounding horn, 
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare. 
So through the darkness and the cold we hew, 
And not a voice was idle : with the din 
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud ; 



44 WORDSWORTH. 



The leafless trees and every igj crag 
Tinkled like iron ; while far distant hills 
Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, 
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 
The orange sky of evening died away." 

This intimacy with the face of the earth, this rich 
and keen sense of pleasure in English nature, whether 
in her vernal or her wintry aspects, Wordsworth carried 
with him into manhood. Submitting it, together with 
all else that he knew of himself, to his judgment for 
examination, he seems even to have arrived at a theory 
that it is essential for every poet that would peacefully 
possess his faculty in these modern times to connect 
himself permanently and domestically with some appro- 
priate spot or tract of scenery, the whole influence of 
which he may thoroughly exhaust and incorporate with 
his verse. At least, in his own case, some such general 
conviction appears to have blended with the mere 
sentiment of local attachment, which was doubtless 
strong in him, in determining his retirement to the 
Lakes. There are even traces, we fancy, of a dispo- 
sition on his part to generalize the feeling still more, 
and to lay it down as a maxim that, in all ordinary 
cases, the natal spot of every human being is the 
appropriate spot of his activity through life, removal 
from which must injure him, and that, so far as our 



WORDSWORTH. 45 



present social arrangements render this impossible, and 
our present facilities for locomotion render the reverse 
easy, so far we fall short of the ideal state of things. 
In the abeyance of this law (hard law for many !) 
lay, he seems to have felt, one of the great uses of 
descriptive poetry. While men do tear themselves 
awav from their native localities, and traverse the earth, 
or congregate in cities, descriptive poetry, he persuaded 
himself, must ever possess a refreshing and medicinal 
virtue. It was one of his most valued claims, there- 
fore, that he should be considered a genuine English 
descriptive poet. And certainly this is a claim that 
even those who think most humbly of his attainments 
cannot deny him. There would be a propriety, we 
think, in remembering Wordsworth as a descriptive 
poet along with Chaucer and Thomson, thus distin- 
guishing him both from such poets as Burns and 
Tennyson, on the one hand, and from such poets as 
Keats on the other. In such poets as Burns and 
Tennyson, the element of what may be called human 
reference is always so decided that, though no poets 
describe nature more beautifully when they have oc- 
casion, it would still be improper to speak of them 
specially as descriptive poets. To borrow a distinction 
from the sister art, it may be said that, if Burns and 
Tennyson are more properly classed with the figure- 
painters, notwithstanding the extreme beauty and finish 



46 WORDSWORTH. 



of their natural backgrounds, so, on the same principle, 
Wordsworth, whose skill in delineating the human 
subject is also admitted, may yet not erroneously be 
classed with the landscape-painters. On the other 
hand, he differs from poets like Keats in this, that, 
being a native of the country, and accustomed there- 
fore to the appearances of rural nature in all seasons, 
he does not confound Nature with Vegetation. In the 
poetry of Keats, as all must feel, there is an excess 
of merely botanical imagery ; in reading his descrip- 
tions we seem either to breathe the air of a hothouse,, 
heavy with the moist odours of great-leafed exotics, or 
to lie full-stretched at noon in some shady nook in 
a wood, rank underneath with the pipy hemlock, and 
kindred plants of strange overgrowth. In Wordsworth, 
as we have seen, there is no such unhealthy luscious- 
ness. He has his spots of thick herbage and his banks 
of florid richness too ; but what he delights in is the 
broad, clear expanse, the placid lake, the pure pellucid 
air, the quiet outline of the mountain. 

The second characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry to 
which we would call attention is the general intellectual 
vigour it displays, the large amount of really excellent 
thought that is bedded in it — thought that would have 
been valuable to the w T orld in whatever form it had 
been put forth, and which might easily, had Words- 
worth not been a poet, have been put forth otherwise 



WORDSWORTH. 47 



than in metre. We have already asserted, with suf- 
ficient distinctness, that poetry is something essentially 
different from thought or proposition put into verse. 
A man may carry in his head a quantity of thought 
sufficient to set up a university, or to supersede a 
British Association, and yet be no poet. Or, on the 
other hand, a man may have something of the poetic 
spark in him, and be an intellectual weakling. It 
remains true, nevertheless, that intellect, or thought — 
clear, large intellect, such as would be available for 
any purpose whatever ; deep, abundant thought, such as 
we find in the best philosophical writings — is essential 
towards forming a great poet. This intellect of the 
poet may either exert itself in such a state of perfect 
diffusion through the rest of his mind in its creative 
act as only to become manifest in the completed 
grandeur of the result — which is the case, for example 
with the poetry of Homer and Milton; or it may 
retain its right to act also as a separate organ for the 
secretion of pure matter of thought — which is the case 
with the poetry of Shakespeare. In Wordsworth's 
poetry the presence of a superior intellect — an intellect 
strong, high, and subtle, if not of extreme dimensions 
—may be discovered by both of these tests. In the 
first place, the substance of his poetry, its logical com- 
pactness, and its entire freedom from mere common- 
place, prove that a powerful and scholarly mind must 



48 WORDSWORTH. 



have presided over the work of production. On the 
other hand, for proofs that Wordsworth was familiar, 
even formally, with the best philosophical ideas of his 
time, one needs only to dip into his Excursion, or any 
other of his severer poems. Thus, in the following 
passage, short as it is, the metaphysical reader will 
discern a perfect mastery, on the part of the poet, over 
a conception the power of grasping which is recognised 
in the schools as the one test of a mind capable of 
metaphysical studies : — 

" My voice proclaims 
How exquisitely the individual Mind 
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
Of the whole species) to the External world 
Is fitted : — and how exquisitely too — 
Theme this but little heard of among men — 
The External world is fitted to the Mind ; 
And the Creation (by no lower name 
Can it be called) which they with blended might 
Accomplish— this is our high argument." 



This and similar conceptions of a very high metaphysics 
were evidently as familiar to Wordsworth as they were 
to Coleridge, from whom, it is Yerj probable, he may 
have originally derived some of them. Indeed, if we 
make due allowance for the necessary difference 
between the scientific and the poetic mode of pre- 
senting truths, it may be alleged that there is hardly 



WORDSWORTH. 49 



a notion of any generality pnt forth, by Coleridge, 
whether in psychology, theology, politics, or literary 
criticism, some recognition of which may not be 
discovered either in the poems or in the prose disser- 
tations of Wordsworth. The agreement between the 
two men intellectually seems to have been complete in 
almost every particular. Both professed political Con- 
servatism ; both conducted their speculative reason- 
ings to a point where they merged in belief in Divine 
Eevelation, and in a system of tenets derived from that 
belief, not differing essentially from theological ortho- 
doxy ; and both exhibited an ardent attachment to 
the forms and rules of the Church of England. It may 
even be questioned by a certain class of critics whether 
Wordsworth, in his treatment of such matters, has 
not sometimes taken leave of the poetical mood 
altogether, and assumed the mood of the preacher; 
whether the didactic fit did not sometimes overcome 
him in his poetry, and whether he has not allowed the 
controversial spirit, so manifest in his prefaces, to run 
over also somewhat deleteriously into his verse. 

As distinct from the general intellectual excellence 
of Wordsworth's productions, we have to notice, farther, 
their singularly calm, religious, and contemplative tone. 
By thoughtfulness or contemplativeness we usually 
mean something quite distinguishable from mere intel- 
lectual vigour or opulence. The French are an intel- 

E 



50 WORDSWORTH. 



lectual nation ; they think rapidly and powerfully ; but 
they do not answer to our notion of a thoughtful or con- 
templative people. Contemplativeness, according to our 
usage of the word, does not so much imply the power 
of attaining or producing thought as the power of 
brooding sentimentally over thought already attained. 
If we first oppose the speculative to the active, and then 
make a farther distinction between the speculative and 
the contemplative, the character of Hamlet in Shake- 
speare may be taken to represent the union of the specu- 
lative and the contemplative. The Prince is a student 
from the university, daring into all questions, and fer- 
tile at every moment in new generalities and pregnant 
forms of expression ; but his peculiarity consists in this, 
that far back in his mind there lie certain permanent 
thoughts and conceptions, towards which he always 
reverts when left alone, and from which he has ever 
to be roused afresh when anything is to be done. 
Now it is this tendency to relapse into a few favourite 
and constitutional trains of thought that makes the 
contemplative character. Nor is it difficult to see 
in what thought it is, above all others, that the con- 
templative mind will always find its most appropriate 
food. Birth, death, the future ; the sufferings and 
misdeeds of man in this life, and his hopes of a life to 
come ; the littleness of us and our whole sphere of 
knowledge, and the awful relations in which we stand 



WORDSWORTH. 51 



to a world of the supernatural — these, if any, are the 
permanent and inevitable objects of human contem- 
plation and solicitude. From age to age these thoughts 
have been handed down ; every age must entertain, 
and no age can conclude, them. What the ancient 
Chaldean meditated as he lay at night under the stars 
of the desert, the same things does the modern 
student meditate as he paces his lonely room. " Man, 
that is born of woman, is of few days and full of 
trouble ; " " How can a man be justified with 
God V' " that one might plead for a man with 
God as a man pleadeth for his neighbour ! " — amid 
all the changes of manners, dynasties, and races, 
these thoughts survive. They, and such like, are 
the peculiarly human thoughts, the thoughts of 
humanity as such, the thoughts upon which mankind 
must always fall back, and compared with which all 
other thoughts are but intrusions and impertinences. 
Now, although it would be possible to show that the 
effect even of abstract speculation, if carried far enough, 
is to lead men back into these thoughts and keep them 
there, so that in this sense the most speculative men 
must, as if by compulsion, become profoundly contem- 
plative, yet for general purposes a distinction may be 
drawn between men who are speculative and men who 
are contemplative in their tendencies. Some men are 
always active intellectually, always engaged in some 

E 2 



52 W0RDSW0RT3. 



process of inquiry and ingenuity — inventing a machine, 
scheming a project, discovering a law of mind or 
matter. These men are, in the present sense, specu- 
lative men; they are continually at work within the 
ascertained sphere of human activity ; and it is by 
the labours . of such men that the mass of this world's 
experience of its own self-contained capabilities has 
been accumulated. But there are other men who, 
either without being mentally active in this way, or 
besides being thus active, have a constitutional 
tendency at all times to fall into a musing attitude, 
to relapse, as we have already expressed it, into certain 
ancient and footworn trains of thought that lead 
apparently nowhither. These are the contemplative 
men. They are the men whose favourite position 
is rather at the circumference of the known sphere 
than within it, the men who, at whatever time they 
may be born, receive, cherish, and transmit the per- 
manent and characteristic thoughts of the human race. 
This quality of contemplativeness is always associated 
in our minds with the idea of sadness, tearfulness, 
melancholy. The patriarch Isaac, of whom we are told 
that he went out into the fields to meditate at even- 
tide, seems, in our fancy, the most mild and pensive of 
the characters of Scripture. And such men are the salt 
of the earth. There may be little originality, indeed, 
in the thoughts that form the appropriate food of the 



WORDSWORTH. 53 



contemplative mind. To realize the conception " All 
flesh is grass/' or the conception " Why do the wicked 
prosper ? " seems but a very small effort of the intellect, 
by no means comparable to the effort required in almost 
c-very act of daily life. Nevertheless, it remains true 
that it is only out of a deep soil of such old and simple 
conceptions that any kind of true human greatness can 
rear itself, and also that there are very few minds indeed, 
in these days of ours, over which these and similar 
conceptions have their due degree of power. It is 
accordingly one of the chief merits of Wordsworth that 
in him this reference to the supernatural, this disposition 
to interpret all that is visible in the spirit of a con- 
viction of its evanescence, did exist in a very high and 
unusual measure. He was essentially a pensive or 
contemplative man, one who was perpetually recurring 
to those few extreme thoughts and conceptions which 
most men never care to reach, and beyond which no 
man can go. This, which was conspicuous in the very 
aspect of his countenance, and which his recluse life 
illustrated, he has himself explicitly asserted. 

" On man, on nature, and on human life, 
Musing in solitude, I oft perceive 
Fair trains of imagery before me rise, 
Accompanied by feelings of delight 
Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed ; 
And I am conscious of affecting thoughts 
And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes 



54 WORDSWORTH. 



Or elevates the mind, content to weigh 

The good and evil of onr mortal state. 

To these emotions, whencesoe'er they come, 

Whether from breath of outward circumstance, 

Or from the soul — an impulse to herself — 

I would give utterance in numerous verse." 

It is the blending in Wordsworth of this contemplative 
tendency with so much general vigour of intellect that 
has earned for him the name of the English Philo- 
sophical Poet. It ought to be observed, at the same 
time, that in all Wordsworth's contemplative poetry the 
influence of Christian doctrine is plainly discernible. 
His meditations on Man, Nature, and the Future, are 
not those of a Pagan sage, however his language may 
sometimes consist even with a lofty Pagan view of the 
universe : on the contrary, he seems to think through- 
out as one in whose manner of transacting those great 
and paramount conceptions that form the necessary 
matter of all real contemplation that sweet modification 
had been wrought which Christianity has rendered 
possible. 

One of the results of Wordsworth's naturally pensive 
disposition, left to exspatiate as it chiefly was among the 
objects of a retired and pastoral neighbourhood, was 
that it gave him a specially keen and sympathetic eye 
for the characteristic miseries of rural life. We do not 
think that he was the man that could 



WORDSWORTH. 55 



" hang 



Brooding above the fierce confederate storm 
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore 
Within the walls of cities;" 

but no man better than he could 

" hear Humanity in fields and groves 
Pipe solitary anguish." 

In pathetic stories of humble rural life we know no 
poet superior to Wordsworth. All the ordinary and, if 
we may so speak, parochial woes of rural existence 
in England seem to have been diligently noted and 
pondered by him. It is told of Burns by Dugald 
Stewart that, as they were walking together one morn- 
ing in the direction of the Braid Hills, near Edinburgh, 
where they commanded a prospect of the adjacent 
country, the poet remarked that the sight of so many 
smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind which he 
did not believe anyone could understand that did not 
know, as he did, how much of real worth and happiness 
such poor habitations might contain. Now, if the 
glance with which Wordsworth, in his poetry, looks 
abroad on the cottage-sprinkled scenery of his native 
district cannot be said to show that warm familiarity 
with the daily tenor of humble rustic life which Burns 
had from experience, it may at least be compared to the 
kindty glance of some pious and diligent pastor, such 



56 WORDSWORTH. 



as "Wordsworth has himself described in his Excursion, 
surveying from a height the scattered homes of his 
well-known parishioners. At home in the parsonage 
there are books, pictures, and a piano, the care of a 
gentle wife or daughters ; in walking over the fields, 
too, the pastor, an academic and cultured man, has 
necessarily thoughts and enjoyments of his own ; never- 
theless, what he has seen and known of the habits of 
those among whom he labours has given him an eye 
to perceive, and a heart to appreciate, their lowliest 
anxieties and sorrows. Almost exactly so it is with 
Wordsworth. The incidents of rural life that he 
delights to depict are precisely those that would arouse 
the interest and occupy the attention of some good 
clergyman, active in his duties, and accustomed to store 
up in his memory the instructive annals of his parish. 
The death of a poor seduced girl, the return of a dis- 
abled soldier to his native village, the wreck of the 
fortunes of a once thriving family, the solitude of aged 
widowhood, the nightly moanings of a red-cloaked 
maniac haunting some dreary spot in the woods- — 
nothing can exceed the pathos with which Wordsworth 
can tell such simple local stories as these. One can 
hardly read without tears some of his narratives of 
this kind : for example, the poem entitled Guilt and 
Sorrow, the pastoral entitled Michael, or the tale of the 
widow Margaret and her lonely cottage as told in the 



WORDSWORTH. 57 



first book of the Excursion. Showing a similar eye for 
the moral picturesque in humble rural life, though alto- 
gether of a more cheerful character, is the hearty tale 
of the Waggoner, perhaps one of the most perfect of 
all Wordsworth's compositions. And here we may 
remark that, if Wordsworth had any such theory as 
we have supposed as to the advantage, in the poetical 
occupation, of a permanent connexion of the poet with 
some one spot or district, then, in such a theory, he 
must necessarily have had respect as well to the power 
of familiar modes of life to form the heart of the poet as 
to the influence of familiar scenery in attuning his 
imagination. And certainly there is much in this. 
Rarely does one that has removed from his native spot 
form elsewhere relations that can stand him in stead 
when he wishes to glance into human life at once 
intimately and broadly. 

Somewhat dissociated in appearance from those 
characteristics of Wordsworth which we have already 
mentioned, but demonstrably compatible w T ith them, 
was his strong sense of the antique : his lively interest 
in the traditional, the legendary, and the historical. We 
see in Wordsworth, in this respect, a certain similarity 
to a man from whom otherwise he differed much — 
Sir Walter Scott. The English poet seems to have had 
the same liking for significant anecdotes and snatches 
of ancient song and ballad, the same reverence for 



58 WORDSWORTH. 



pedigree, and the same pleasure in associating places 
known to hirn with celebrated transactions of the past, 
as were observable, in still larger degree, in the Scottish 
novelist. Among the poems that exemplify this 
characteristic of our author are the dramatic poem of 
The Borderers, the beautiful poem entitled Hart-leap 
Well, the long legendary poem of The White Doe of 
Rylstone (which is in the metre, and somewhat in the 
style, of much of Scott's poetry), and also many of 
the shorter pieces written during tours in Scotland 
and in various parts of England. A particular illus- 
tration of this quality of Wordsworth's mind is also 
presented in his Scott-like habit of introducing, almost 
lovingly, topographical references and the names of 
places into his verse. Thus, in the poem To Joanna, 
describing the echo of a lady's laugh heard among the 
mountains : — 

" The rock, like something starting from a sleep, 
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again ; 
That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag 
Was ready with her cavern ; Hammar-scar 
And the tall steep of Silverhow sent forth 
A noise of laughter ; Southern Loughrigg heard, 
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone ; 
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky 
Carried the Lady's voice ; old Skiddaw blew 
His speaking-trumpet ; back out of the clouds 
Of Glaramara southward came the voice ; 
And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head." 



WORDSWORTH. 59 



But most conspicuously of all the poet has exhibited 
his interest in the antique and historical, and his power 
of imaginatively reproducing it, in his fine series of 
Ecclesiastical Sonnets, wherein he traces, as in a series 
of bold retrospective glimpses, the history of Christi- 
anity in the British Islands. There are passages in 
these Sonnets worth, for historical effect, many pages of 
the writings of our ecclesiastical historians. 

Of the various other excellences of Wordsworth we 
will particularize but one more — the exquisite propriety 
and delicacy of his style, his easy and perfect mastery 
over the element of language. He must have pos- 
sessed a natural gift of rich and exuberant expression ; 
*but it is equally evident that he must have, at a very 
early period, submitted this natural exuberance to a 
careful and classic training, and also that he must have 
bestowed his best pains in finishing, according to his 
own ideas of correctness, all his compositions indi- 
vidually. Hence greater smoothness and beauty, and 
more of strict logical coherence, in Wordsworth's style 
than is usual even among careful poets, as well as a 
more close fitting of the language to the measure of the 
thought, and a comparative freedom from forced rhymes 
and jarring evasions of natural forms of words. This 
appears even in the greater typographical neatness of a 
printed page of Wordsworth's poetry, as compared, for 
example, with a printed page of Byron's, the lax and 



60 WORDSWORTH. 



dash-disrupted look of which suggests to practised eyes 
the notion at once of more energetic genius and greater 
literary haste. Specimens of Wordsworth's extreme 
felicity of expression have already been given in the 
previous extracts ; and in selecting for incessant repeti- 
tion such poems of his as We are Seven, and such 
lines as those famous ones about the " yellow primrose," 
the public have already indicated their appreciation in 
his case of this merit in particular. A quotation or 
two, however, illustrative of the same thing, may here 
be added. Observe how variously and yet simply the 
language, in the following passages, pursues the intri- 
cacies and adapts itself to the mood of the meaning : — 

" A village churchyard, lying as it does in the lap of 
Nature, may indeed be most favourably contrasted with 
that of a town of crowded population ; and sepulture 
therein combines many of the best tendencies which 
belong to the mode practised by the ancients with 
others peculiar to itself. The sensations of pious 
cheerfulness which attend the celebration of the 
Sabbath-day in rural places are profitably chastised by 
the sight of the graves of kindred and friends, gathered 
together in that general home towards which the thought- 
ful yet happy spectators themselves are journeying. 
Hence, a parish church, in the stillness of the country, 
is a visible centre of a community of the living and the 
dead, a point to which are habitually referred the 
nearest concerns of both." — Essay on Epitaphs. 



WORDSWORTH. 61 



" To all that binds the soul in powerless trance, 
Lip-dewing song, and ringlet-tossing dance." 

Descriptive Sketches. 

" She dwelt among the nntrodden ways 

Beside the springs of Dove, 
A maid whom there were none to praise, 

And very few to love : 
A violet by a mossy stone 

Half hidden from the eye ! 
Fair as a star when only one 

Is shining in the sky ! 
She lived unknown, and few could know 

When Lucy ceased to be ; 
But she is in her grave, and, oh, 

The difference to me ! " 

Miscellaneous Poems. 

" Then up I -rose, 
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash 
And merciless ravage ; and the shady nook 
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, - 
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up 
Their quiet being . and, unless I now 
Confound my present feelings with the past, 
Ere from the mutilated bower I turned 
Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings, 
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky." 

Nutting. 
" Great God ! I'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 



62 WORDSWORTH. 



Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

Sonnets. 

" Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room ; 
And hermits are contented with their cells ; 
And students with their pensive citadels ; 
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, 
Sit blithe and happy ; bees that soar for bloom 
High as the highest peak of Furness-fells 
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells : 
In truth, the prison unto which we doom 
Ourselves no prison is : and hence to me, 
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound 
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground ; 
Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) 
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty 
Should find brief solace there, as I have found." 

Sonnets. 

That we would assign to Wordsworth a high place 
among the poets of England the whole tenor of our 
observations hitherto will have made clear. At the 
same time, that he falls short of the very highest rank, 
that he does not stand on the very top of our English 
Parnassus, where Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser keep 
reverent company with Shakespeare, but rather on that 
upper slope of the mountain whence these greatest are 
visible, and where various other poets hold perhaps as 
just, if not so fixed, a footing : this also we have sought 



WORDSWORTH. 63 



to convey as part of our general impression. We do 
not think, for example, that Wordsworth was so great a 
poet as Burns ; and, if it is only in respect of general 
mental vigour and capacity, and not in respect of poetic 
genius per se, that Dryden, Pope, and Coleridge, could 
be justly put in comparison with Wordsworth, and, 
being so put in comparison, preferred to him. on the 
whole, yet there are others in our list of poets for 
whom, even after the ground of competition has been 
thus restricted, we believe it would be possible to take 
up the quarrel. With all the faults of Byron, both 
moral and literary, the poetic efflux in him came from 
greater constitutional depths, and brought, if less pure, 
at least more fervent, matter with it than the poetry of 
Wordsworth : had Keats and Shelley lived longer, even 
those that sneer at the Byronic might have seen poets 
comparable, in their estimation, to the Patriarch of the 
Lakes ; and, should our noble Tennyson survive as a 
constant writer till his black locks have grown grey, one 
sees qualities in him that predict for him more than a 
Wordsworth's fame. Keeping in view, therefore, these 
comparisons and contrasts, it seems proper that we 
should add to the foregoing enumeration of some of 
Wordsworth's characteristic excellences a word or two 
descriptive of some accompanying defects. 

First of all, then, as it seems to us, the intellect of 
Wordsworth, though very far beyond the ordinary in its 



64 WORDSWORTH. 



dimensions, and very assiduously developed by culture, 
was by no means of the largest known English calibre. 
Not to bring into the comparison such rare giants as 
Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton, there have been, and 
probably still are, very many distinguished men in our 
island fit to rank intellectually as the peers of Words- 
worth, or even as his superiors. Making the necessary 
discrimination between native intellectual strength 
to arrive at conclusions and the soundness of the 
conclusions arrived at, one would say that Johnson, 
Burke, Burns, David Hume, and not a few others that 
might be named, were presumably men of more 
powerful intellect than Wordsworth. Partly because 
of the time at which they lived, partly from causes for 
which they were personally more responsible, the 
intellectual conclusions of those men, or of some of 
them, may have been less noble and lofty than those 
of Wordsworth, their favourite forms of thought more 
coarse, their philosophy less true, deep, and ethereal. 
But their intellectual strength or grasp, their sense and 
insight, their whole available power to do, discern, and 
invent, were perhaps greater. Even of Pope, on whose 
reputation as a poet Wordsworth and his followers have 
been so severe, it might be maintained that, comparison 
of poetic merit apart, his was the denser and nimbler 
brain. Nor would the greatest admirers of Words- 
worth say that in force and reach of intellect he 



WORDSWOUTE. 65 



excelled his friend Coleridge. Fine, stately, and silvery 
as Wordsworth's prose writings are, they want the depth, 
originality, and richness of the similar compositions of 
that old man eloquent. Wordsworth's, in short, was 
not a vast or prodigious, but only a very high and 
serene intellect. Now, though it has been already 
shown that it is not intellect as such that makes a 
poet, but that either a man may have a great intellect 
and be no poet or may be a poet without having an 
extraordinary intellect, yet, as it has been shown also 
that to constitute a great poet great intellect is es- 
sential, we may assume it as a fact that the measure of 
the general intellectual power of any particular poet is 
also so far a measure of his poetic excellence. Accord- 
ing to this rule, we should first apply the intellectual 
test, so as to decide Wordsworth's place (probably 
beside such men as Coleridge and Dry den) in our 
general hierarchy of English men of letters of all sorts 
taken together ; then, dividing this miscellaneous body 
into kinds or classes, we should retain Wordsworth 
exactly at his ascertained height among the poets ; and, 
lastly, allowing to the whole class of poets as much 
additional elevation as might be thought necessary, on 
the score of any supposed superiority of the poetical 
constitution as such, we should fix Wordsworth's just 
place among all the ornaments of English literature. 
A second defect in Wordsworth is his want of 

F 



66 WORDSWORTH. 



humour. This charge has been made so often against 
other celebrated writers that one is almost ashamed to 
bring it forward again in any new case whatever. 
Nevertheless, it is a charge of real weight against any 
one regarding whom it can be proved, and it is hardly 
necessary to offer proofs that it is true regarding 
Wordsworth. There are, indeed, poems of his, such as 
TJie Waggoner, The Idiot Bog, and The Street Musician, 
that display a kind of genial and warm interest in the 
little pleasant blunders and less than tragic mishaps of 
daily life ; but in such instances we seem to recognise 
the air of the poet as that of a sedate dreamer looking , 
at matters, or hearing of them, with a hard benevolent 
smile, rather than as that of a man of hearty native 
humour, recklessly enjoying what is jocose. There is 
no real mirth, no rich sense of the comic, in all that 
"Wordsworth has written. In that full sly love of a jest 
that lurks in the down-looking eye of Chaucer, as well 
as in the broad and manly capacity of laughter that 
distinguished Burns, the poet of the Lakes was totally 
wanting. Hence it is that, among all his characters, 
he has given us none like the Host of the Tabard in 
the Ganterhurg Pilgrimage, and that, living as he did in 
a notable part of England, the whole spirit and pecu- 
liarity of which he sought to make his own, he could 
not imbibe or reproduce its humours. Whenever, in 
obedience to an intellectual perception of the existence 



WORDSWORTH. 67 



in society of such so-called " humours," he attempts to 
introduce them into his poetry, he either only reaches 
the playful, or betrays his natural seriousness by keep- 
ing the moral lesson strictly in view. Now, though 
there have been really great poets, Milton and Schiller 
for example, in whom this defect of humour was as 
marked as in Wordsworth, yet in such cases it will be 
found that the defect did, after all, operate to some 
extent injuriously, and had to be made good in some 
way by very ample compensations. If Milton had not 
humour, he had a large measure of what may properly 
enough be called wit, an infinite power of scorn, and a 
tremendous mastery of the language of abuse and sar- 
casm. As regards Byron, also, not to mention Pope, it 
is impossible to say how much not only of his popu- 
larity, but also of his real worth as a poet, may depend 
on the quantity of admirable wit which he brought into 
the service of the Muse. But in Wordsworth there is 
almost as little of wit, properly so called, as of humour. 
His moods are a benevolent seriousness, a rapt and 
spiritual state of the feelings, and a mild and sacerdotal 
sympathy with all that he sees. He may feel contempt, 
as indeed few men are said to have done in a greater 
degree, but he has no art in the ludicrous expression of 
it ; he sometimes smiles, but he never laughs. In a 
poet of actual English life this is to be regarded as a 
considerable disqualification. 

F 2 



68 WORDSWORTH. 



We may indicate another deficiency in Wordsworth 
by repeating the common criticism that he lacks 
energy, fire, impulse, intensity, passion. Wordsworth 
was, according to his own definition of a poet, " a man 
endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm 
and tenderness, than are supposed to be common among 
mankind ; " but what we now mean is something quite 
consistent with this. There was no tremendousness, 
nothing of the Pythic, in the nature of Wordsworth. 

(< I surely not a man ungently made," 

are the fitting words he uses in describing himself. A 
calm, white-haired sage, who could thrill to the beauty 
of a starry night, and not a swart-faced Titan like Burns, 
full of strength and fire, was the poet of the Excursion. 
With all his pathos, all his clearness of vision, there 
were sorrows of humanity he never touched, recesses of 
dark moral experience he could not pierce nor irradiate. 
We feel in his poetry as if we were spoken to by some 
mild and persuasive preacher, rather than borne down 
by the experienced utterance of a large-hearted man. 
He does not move us to the depths of our being ; he 
only affects us gently. One reason for this must be 
that, naturally and by birth, Wordsworth was deficient 
in some of the more formidable elements of the human 
constitution. Possessing in large degree the elements 



\ 

WORDSWORTH. €9 



of intellect, sensibility, and imagination, lie seems to 
have been wanting in the Byronic element of personal 
passion* Moreover, and partly in consequence of this, 
he appears to have passed through the battle of life all 
but unwounded. This of itself would account for the 
placid, self-possessed, and often feeble style of his 
poetry. In the life of every man distinguished for 
what is called momentum of character there will almost 
certainly be found some sore biographical circumstance 
— some fact deeper and more momentous than all the 
rest— some strictly historical source of melancholy, that 
must be discovered and investigated if we would com- 
prehend his ways. Man comes into this world regard- 
less and unformed ; and, although in his gradual pro- 
gress through it he necessarily acquires, by the mere 
use of his senses and by communication with others, a 
multitudinous store of impressions and convictions, yet, 
if there is to be anything specific and original in his 
life, this, it would seem, can only be produced by the 
operation upon him of some one overbearing accident 
or event, which, rousing him to new wakefulness, and 
evoking all that is latent in his nature, shall bind these 
impressions and convictions in a mass together, breathe 
through them the sternness of personal concern, and 
impart to them its seal and pressure. The experiences 
that most commonly perform this function in the lives 



WORDSWORTH. 



of men are those of Friendship and Love. The power 
of Love to rouse men to larger and more fervid views of 
nature has been celebrated since the beginning of time. 
A man that has once undergone Love's sorrow in any 
extreme degree is by that fact awakened at once and 
for ever to the melancholy side of things ; he becomes 
alive to the gloomy in nature and to the miserable in 
life ; and, by one stupendous resumption of stars, clouds, 
trees, and flowers, into his own pained being, like an 
old coinage requiring re-issue, he realizes how it is that 
^all creation groaneth and travaileth together in spirit 
until now. So also, though perhaps more rarely, with 
the influence of exalted and lost Friendship. But 
Wordsworth, happily for himself, seems to have met 
with no such accident of revolution. Passing through 
the world as a pilgrim, pure-minded, and even sad with 
the sense of the mysterious future, nothing occurred in 
his journey to strike him down as a dead man, and 
agonize him into a full knowledge of the whole mystery 
of the present. Hence, we believe, the want of that 
intensity in his poetry which we find in the writings, 
not only of the so-called subjective poets, such as 
Byron and Dante, but also of the greatest objective 
poets, as Goethe and Shakespeare. The ink of Words- 
worth is rarely his own blood. 

It is little more than an extension of the last remark 



WORDSWORTH. 71 



to say that Wordsworth, was rather a poet or bard than 
(if we may be allowed the distinction) a lyrist or 
minstrel. The purpose of the poet, to use the term 
for the moment in this restricted sense, is to describe, 
narrate, or represent some portion of the external, as it 
is rounded out and made significant in his own mind ; 
the purpose of the lyrist or minstrel is to pour forth 
the passing emotions of his soul and inflame other men 
with the fire that consumes himself. Accordingly, the 
faculties most special to the merely poetic exercise, 
as in the old Homeric epos or in modern descriptive 
verse, are those of intellect, sensibility, and imagination 
— passion or personal excitement being but a separate 
element, which may be more or less present according 
to circumstances, and which ought, as some think, to be 
absent from pure poetry altogether ; whereas, in lyrical 
effusion, on the other hand, passion or present excite- 
ment is nearly all in all The poetry of Keats may be 
taken as a specimen of pure poetry as such : all his 
chief poems are literally compositions or creations, the 
results of a process by which the poet's mind, having 
projected itself into an entirely imaginary element, 
devoid of all connexion with the present, worked and 
moved therein slowly and fantastically at its own will 
and pleasure. As specimens, again, of the purely 
lyrical, we have all such pieces, ancient and modern, as 



72 WORDSWORTH. 



are properly denominated psalms, odes, hymns, or 
songs. When, therefore, people talk, as they now in- 
cessantly do, of calmness as being essential to the poet, 
and when, with Wordsworth, they define the poetic art 
to consist in the tranquil recollection of bygone emotion, 
it is clear that they can have in view only pure poetry, 
the end of which is to represent in an imaginative man- 
ner some portion of the outward. For, of the lyrist 
or song-writer it may be affirmed, just as of his near 
kinsman the orator, that the more of passion or per- 
sonal impetus he has the better ; and, so far from 
advising him to wait for complete tranquillity, one 
would advise him to select, as the true lyrical moment, 
that first moment, whenever it is, when the primary 
perturbation has just so far subsided that his trembling 
hands can sweep the strings. But with this difference 
comes another. The poet, in describing his scene or 
narrating his story, feels himself impelled to every 
legitimate mode of increasing the pleasure he conveys ; 
and the result, in one direction, is Metre. But, how- 
ever natural Metre may have been in its origin, it has 
snow become to the poet rather a pre-established ar- 
rangement or available set of conditions, to the rule of 
which he adapts what he has already in other respects 
rendered complete, than a compulsory suggestion of the 
poetic act itself. Not so with the lyrist. As cadence 



WORDSWORTH. 73 



or musical utterance is natural in an excited state of 
the feelings, so in lyrical poetry ought the song or 
melody to be more than the words. The heart of the 
lyrist should be a perpetual fountain of song ; and, 
when he is to hold direct communication with the 
world, an inarticulate hum or murmur, rising, as it 
were, from the depths of his being, ought to precede 
and necessitate all the actual speech. Now, in this 
lyrical capability, this love of sound or cadence for its 
own sake, Wordsworth is certainly inferior to many 
other poets. One might have inferred as much from 
the narrowness of his theory of verse ; but the fact is 
rendered still more apparent by a perusal of his poems 
themselves. Very few poets have been more admirable 
masters of poetic metre : no versification is more clear, 
various, and flexible, or more soothing to the ear, than 
that of Wordsworth. But he is not a singer or a min- 
strel properly so called; the lyric madness does not 
seize him; verse with him is rather an exquisite 
variety of rhetoric, a legitimate aesthetic device, than 
a necessary form of utterance. Seldom in Wordsworth 
is there a stanza after reading which and quite losing 
sight of the words we are still haunted (as we con- 
stantly are in Burns, Byron, and Tennyson) by an 
obstinate recollection of the tune. Were we required 
to say in what portion of Wordsworth's poetry he has 



74 WORDSWORTH. 



shown most of this true lyric spirit, in which we believe 
him to have been on the whole deficient, we should un- 
hesitatingly mention his Sonnets. These are among the 
finest and most sonorous things in our language ; and 
it is by them, in conjunction with his Excursion (or, as 
we may now say, The Recluse) that his great name will 
be most surely perpetuated. 



11. 



SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH 
LITERATURE. 



II. 

SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH LITERATURE. 1 

It was in the winter of 1786-87 that the poet Burns, a 
new prospect having been suddenly opened up to him 
by the kind intervention of Blacklock and a few other 
influential men in Edinburgh, abandoned his desperate 
project of emigrating to the West Indies, and hastened 
to pay his memorable first visit to the Scottish metro- 
polis. During that winter, as all who are acquainted 
with his life know, the Ayrshire ploughman, then in his 
twenty- ninth year, was the lion of Edinburgh society. 
Lord Monboddo, Dugald Stewart, Harry Erskine, Dr. 
Kobertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. 
Gregory, Dr. Black, Dr. Adam Ferguson: such were 
the names then most conspicuous in the literary capital 

i North British Review, August 1852. — "Life of Lord Jeffrey: with 
a Selection from his Correspondence." By Lord Cockbukn, one of the 
Judges of the Court of Session in Scotland. 2 vols. 1852. [What 
is here printed is only the introductory part of the article as it stood 
in the Rcvieiv. ] 



SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 



of North Britain ; and it was in the company of these 
men, alternated with that of the Creeches, the Smellies, 
the Willie Mcols, and other contemporary Edinburgh 
celebrities of a lower grade, that Burns first realized 
the fact that he was no mere bard of local note, but 
a new power and magnate in Scottish Literature. 

To those who are alive to the poetry of coincidences 
two anecdotes connected with this residence of Burns 
in Edinburgh will always be interesting. 

What reader of Lockhart's Life of Scott has ever for- 
gotten the account there given of Scott's first and only 
interview with Burns ? As the story is now more 
minutely told in Mr. Bobert Chambers's Life of Burns, 
Scott, who was then a lad of sixteen, just removed from 
the High School to a desk in his father's office, was 
invited by his friend and companion, the son of Dr. 
Eerguson, to accompany him to his father's house on 
an evening when Burns was to be there. The two 
youngsters entered the room, sat down unnoticed by 
their seniors, and looked on and listened in modest 
silence. Burns, when he came in, seemed a little out 
of his element. Instead of mingling at once with the 
company, he kept going about the room, looking at the 
pictures on the walls. One print particularly arrested 
his attention. It represented a soldier lying dead 
among the snow, his dog on one side, and a woman 
with a child in her arms on the other. Underneath 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 79 

the print were some lines of verse descriptive of the 
subject, which Burns read aloud with a voice faltering 
with emotion. A little while after, turning to the 
company and pointing to the print, he asked if any 
one could tell him who was the author of the lines. 
No one chanced to know, except Scott, who remembered 
that they w r ere from an obscure poem of Langhorne's. 
The information, whispered by Scott to some one near, 
was repeated to Burns ; who, after asking a little more 
about the matter, rewarded his young informant with 
a look of kindly interest, and the words, (Sir Adam 
Ferguson reports them,) " You'll be a man yet, sir." 
Such is the story of the "literary ordination," as Mr. 
Chambers well calls it, of Scott by Burns. It is a 
scene which Sir William Allan should have been the 
man to paint. 

The other story is now told for the first time by 
Lord Cockburn. Somewhere about the very day on 
which the foregoing incident happened, " a little black 
creature " of a boy, we are told, who was going up the 
High Street of Edinburgh, and staring diligently about 
him, was attracted by the appearance of a man whom 
he saw standing on the pavement. He was taking a 
leisurely view of the object of his curiosity, when some 
one standing at a shop-door tapped him on the shoulder, 
and said, " Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man ! 
that's Kobert Burns." The " little black creature " thus 



80 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

early addicted to criticism, was Francis Jeffrey, the 
junior of Scott by two years, and exactly four years 
behind him in the classes of the High School, where he 
was known as a clever nervous little fellow, who never 
lost a place without crying. It is mentioned by Lord 
Cockburn that Jeffrey's first teacher at the High 
School, a Mr. Luke Eraser, had the good fortune to 
send forth, from three successive classes of four years 
each, three pupils no less distinguished than Walter 
Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and Henry Brougham. 

It is not for the mere purpose of anecdote that we 
cite these names and coincidences. We should like 
very much to make out for Scotland in general as sug- 
gestive a series of her intellectual representatives as 
Lord Cockburn has here made out for part of the peda- 
gogic era of the worthy and long dead Mr. Luke Eraser. 
Nor is it a difficult task. 

Confining our regards to the eighteenth century, the 
preceding paragraphs enable us to group together at 
least three conspicuous Scottish names as belonging, by 
right of birth, to the third quarter of that century — 
Burns, born in Ayrshire in 1759 ; Scott, born in Edin- 
burgh in 1771 ; and Jeffrey, born in the same place in 
1773. Suppose, however, that we go a little farther 
back for some other prominent Scottish names of the 
same century. Then the readiest to occur to the 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 81 



memory will be these:— James Thomson, the poet, 
born in Roxburghshire in 1700 ; Thomas Eeid, the 
philosopher, born near Aberdeen in 1710; David 
Hume, born at Edinburgh in 1711 ; Robertson, the 
historian, born in Mid-Lothian in 1721 ; Tobias Smol- 
lett, the novelist, born at Cardross in the same year ; 
Adam Smith, born at Kirkaldy, in 1723; Robert 
Eergusson, the Scottish poet, born at Edinburgh in 
1750 ; and Dugald Stewart, born at Edinburgh in 1753. 
If, for a similar purpose, we come down to the last 
quarter of the century, five names at least will be sure 
to occur to us, in addition to that of Brougham — 
Thomas Campbell, born in Glasgow in 1777 ; Thomas 
Chalmers, born at Anstruther in Fifeshire in 1780 ; 
John Wilson, born at Paisley in 1785; Sir William 
Hamilton, born at Glasgow in 1788 ; Edward Irving, 
born at Annan in Dumfriesshire in 1792 ; and Thomas 
Carlyle, born near Ecclefechan, in the same county, in 
1795. In this list we omit the distinguished contem- 
porary Scottish names in physical scienoe. We ought 
not, however, to omit the names of Sir James Mackin- 
tosh, T^orn near Inverness in 1765, and James Mill, born 
at Montrose in 1773. The short life of Burns, if we 
choose him as the central figure of the group, connects 
all the persons named. The oldest of them was in 
the prime of life when Burns was born, and the 
youngest of them had seen the light before Burns died 

G 



82 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

On glancing along this series of eminent Scotchmen 
born in the eighteenth century, it will be seen that 
they may be roughly distributed into two nearly equal 
classes — men of philosophic intellect, devoted to the 
work of general speculation, or thought as such; and 
men of literary or poetic genius, whose works beloug 
more properly to the category of pure literary or artistic 
effort. In the one class may be ranked Eeid, Hume, 
Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Mackintosh, Mill, 
Chalmers, and Sir William Hamilton ; in the other, 
Thomson, Smollett, Eobertson, Fergusson, Burns, 
Scott, Jeffrey, Campbell, Wilson, Irving, and Carlyle. 
Do not let us be mistaken. In using the phrases "philo- 
sophic intellect " and " literary genius " to denote the 
distinction referred to, we do not imply anything of 
accurate discrimination between the phrases themselves. 
For aught that we care, the phrases may be reversed, 
and the men of the one class may be styled men of 
philosophic genius, and those of the other men of 
literary habit and intellect. If we prefer to follow the 
popular usage in our application of the terms, it is not 
with any intention of making out for the one class, by 
the appropriation to it of the peculiar term " genius," 
a certificate of a higher kind of excellence than belongs 
to the other. Even according to the popular accepta- 
tion of the term, several of those whom we have 
included in the literary category — as, for example, 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 83 

Robertson — must be denied the title of men of genius : 
while, by no endurable definition of the term, could 
the title of men of genius be refused to such men as 
Adam Smith, Chalmers, and Hamilton. Nor even when 
thus explained will our classification bear a very rigid 
scrutiny. By a considerable portion of what may be 
called the fundamental or unapparent half of his genius 
Carlyle belongs to the class of speculative thinkers ; 
while, on the other hand, the case of Chalmers is one 
in which the thinking or speculative faculty, which cer- 
tainly belonged to him, was surcharged and deluged by 
such a constant flood from the feelings that, instead 
of ranking him with the thinkers as above, we might, 
with equal or greater propriety, transpose him to 
the other side, or even name him on both sides. His 
thinking faculty, which was what he himself set most 
store by, was so beset and begirt by his other and more 
active dispositions that, instead of working on and on 
through any resisting medium with iron continuity, it 
discharged itself almost invariably, as soon as it touched 
a subject, in large proximate generalizations. 

On the whole, then, instead of the foregoing classifi- 
cation of eminent Scotchmen into men of speculation 
and men of general literature, one might adopt as 
equally serviceable a less formal classification which 
the common satirical talk respecting Scotchmen will 
suggest. The hard, cool, logical Scotchman : such is 

G 2 



84 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

the stereotyped phrase in which Englishmen describe 
the natives of North Britain. There is a sufficient 
amount of true perception in the phrase to justify its 
use ; but the appreciation it involves reaches only to 
the surface. The well-known phrase, jperfervidum inge- 
nium Scotorwn, used, Buchanan tells us, centuries ago 
on the Continent to express the idea of the Scottish 
character then universally current, and founded on a 
large induction of instances, is, in reality, far nearer 
to the fact. Without maintaining at present that all 
Scotchmen are perfervid, — that Scotchmen in general 
are, as we have seen it ingeniously argued, not cool, 
calculating, and cautious, but positively rash, fanatical, 
and tempestuous, — it will be enough to refer to the 
instances which prove at least that some Scotchmen 
have this character. The thing may be expressed 
thus : — On referring to the actual list of Scotchmen 
who have attained eminence by their writings or 
speeches in this or the last century, two types may 
be distinguished, in one or the other of which the 
Scottish mind seems necessarily to cast itself — (1) an 
intellectual type specifically Scottish, but Scottish only 
in the sense that it is the type which cultured Scottish 
minds assume when they devote themselves to the 
work of specific investigation ; and (2) a more popular 
type, characterizing those Scotchmen who, instead of 
pursuing the work of specific investigation, follow a 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 85 

career calling forth all the resources of thought and 
sentiment. Scotchmen of the first, or more fixed and 
formal, type are Eeid, Smith, Hume, Mill, Mackintosh, 
and Hamilton; in all of whom, notwithstanding their 
differences, we see that tendency towards metaphysical 
speculation for which the Scottish mind has become 
celebrated. Scotchmen of the other or popular type, 
partaking of the metaphysical tendency or not, but 
drawing their essential inspiration from the sentimental 
depths of the national character, are Burns, Scott, 
Chalmers, Irving, and Carlyle. However we may 
choose to express it, the fact of this twofold forthgoing 
of the Scottish mind, either in the scholastic and logical 
direction marked out by one series of eminent prede- 
cessors, or in the popular and literary direction marked 
out by another series of eminent predecessors, cannot 
be denied. 

After all, however, there is, classify and distinguish 
as we may, a remarkable degree of homogeneousness 
among Scotchmen. The people of North Britain are 
more homogeneous, have decidedly a more visible basis 
of common character, than the people of South Britain. 
A Scotchman may indeed be almost anything that is 
possible in this world. He may be a saint or a de- 
bauchee, a Christian or a sceptic, a spendthrift or a 
usurer, a soldier or a statesman, a poet or a statistician, 
a fool or a man of genius, clear-headed or confused- 



86 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

headed, a Thomas Chalmers or a Joseph Hume, a dry 
man of mere secular facts, or a man through whose 
mind there roll for ever the stars and all mysteries. 
Still, under every possible form of mental combina- 
tion or activity, there will be found in every Scotch- 
man something distinguishable as his birth- quality or 
Scotticism. « 

What is this Scotticism of Scotchmen ? What is this 
ineradicable, universally-combinable element or pecu- 
liarity, breathed into the Scottish soul by those condi- 
tions of nature and of life which inhere in or hover over 
the area of the Scottish earth, and which are repeated 
in the same precise ensemble nowhere else ? Comes it 
from the hills, or the moors, or the mists, or any of 
those other features of scenery and climate which dis- 
tinguish bleak and rugged Scotland from green and 
fertile England? In part, doubtless, from these, as 
from all else that is Scottish. But there are hills, and 
moors, and mists where Scotchmen are not bred ; and 
it is rather in the long series of the memorable things 
that have been done on the Scottish hills and moors — 
the acts which the retrospective eye sees flashing 
through the old Scottish mists — that one is to seek 
the origin and explanation of whatever Scotticism is. 
Now, as compared with England at least, that which 
has come down to the natives of Scotland as some- 
thing peculiar, generated by the series of past trans- 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 8? 



actions of which their country has been the scene, 
is an intense spirit of nationality. 

No nation in the world is more factitious than the 
Scotch, none more composite. If in England there 
have been Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, 
in Scotland there have been Celts, Romans, Norwegians, 
Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and Anglo-Normans. The only 
difference of any consequence in this respect probably 
is that, whereas in England the Celtic element is de- 
rived chiefly from the British or Welsh, and the Gothic 
element chiefly from the Teutonic or Continental- 
German source, in Scotland the Gaels have furnished 
most of the Celtic, and the Scandinavian Germans most 
of the Gothic element. Nor, if we regard the agencies 
that have acted intellectually on the two nations, shall 
we find Scotland to have been less notably affected 
from without than England. To mention only one 
circumstance, the Reformation in Scotland was marked 
by a much more decided importation of new modes 
of thinking and new social forms than the Reformation 
in the sister country. But, though quite as factitious 
as the English nation, the Scottish, by reason of its 
very smallness, has always possessed a more intense 
consciousness of its nationality, and a greater liability 
to be acted upon throughout its whole substance by a 
common thought or a common feeling. Even as late 
as the year 1707 the entire population of Scotland did 



88 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

not exceed one million of individuals ; and if, going 
farther back, we fancy this small nation placed on the 
frontier of one so much larger, and obliged continually 
to defend itself against the attacks of so powerful a 
neighbour, we can have no difficulty in conceiving how, 
in the smaller nation, the feeling of a central life would 
be sooner developed and kept more continuously active. 
The sentiment of nationality is essentially negative. It 
is the sentiment of a people which has been taught to 
recognise its own individuality by incessantly marking 
the line of exclusion between itself and others. Almost 
all the great movements of Scotland, as a nation, have 
accordingly been of a negative character. They have 
been movements of self-defence. The War of National 
Independence against the Edwards, the Non-Episcopal 
struggle in the reigns of the Charleses, the Non-Intrusion 
controversy of later times, may be taken as examples. 
The very motto of Scotland is negative : Nemo me im- ' 
pune lacesset. It is different with England. There have 
of course been negative movements in England too, but 
these have been movements of one faction or part of 
? the English people against another ; and the activity 
of the English nation, as a whole, has consisted, not in 
preserving its own individuality from external attack, 
but in fully and genially evolving the various elements 
which it finds within itself, or in powerful positive 
exertions of its strength upon what lies outside of it. 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 89 

The first and most natural form of what we have 
called the Scotticism of Scotchmen — that is, of the 
peculiarity which differences them from people of other 
countries, and more expressly from Englishmen — is 
this amor patrice, this inordinate intensity of national 
feeling. There are very few Scotchmen who, whatever 
they may pretend, are devoid of this pride in being 
Scotchmen. Penetrate to the heart of any Scotchman, 
even the most Anglified or the most philosophic that 
can be found, and there will certainly be seen a rem- 
nant in it of loving regard for the little land that lies 
north of the Tweed. And what eminent Scotchman 
can be named in whose constitution a larger or smaller 
proportion of the amor Scotia? has not been visible? 
In some of the foremost of such men, as in Burns, 
Scott, and Wilson, this amor Scotia? has been present 
as even a professed ingredient of their genius, a senti- 
ment determining, to a great extent, the style and 
matter of all that they have written or attempted: — 

" The rough bur- thistle spreading wide 
Amang the bearded bear, 
I turned the weeder- clips aside, 
And spared the symbol dear. 
~No nation, no station 

My envy e'er could raise ; 
A Scot still, but blot still, 
I knew nae higher praise." 



90 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

In reading the writings of such men, one is perpetually 
reminded, in the most direct manner, that these writings 
are to be regarded as belonging to a strictly national 
literature. But even in those Scotchmen in the deter- 
mination of whose intellectual efforts the o,mor Scotice 
has acted no such ostensible part the presence of some 
mental reference to, or intermittent communication 
of sentiment with, the land of their birth is almost 
sure to be detected. The speculations of Eeid, Hume, 
and Adam Smith, and, in some degree, also, those of 
Chalmers, were on matters interesting not to Scotchmen 
alone, but to the human race as such ; and yet, pre- 
cisely as these men enunciated their generalities 
intended for the whole world in good broad Scotch, 
so had they all, after their different ways, a genuine 
Scottish relish for Scottish humours, jokes, and anti- 
quities. The same thing is true of Carlyle, a power 
as he is recognised to be not in Scottish only, but in 
all European literature. Even James Mill, who, more 
than most Scotchmen, succeeded in conforming, both 
in speech and in writing, to English habits and require- 
ments, relapsed into the Scot when he listened to a Scot- 
tish song or told a Scottish anecdote. But perhaps 
the most interesting example of the appearance of an 
intense amor Bcotim where, from the nature of the case, 
it could have been least expected, is afforded by the 
writings of Sir "William Hamilton. If there is a man 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 91 

now alive conspicuous among his contemporaries for 
the exercise on the most magnificent scale of an 
intellect the most pure and abstract, that man is Sir 
William ; x and yet, not even when discussing the 
philosophy of the unconditioned or perfecting the 
theory of syllogism, does he forget his Scottish lineage. 
With what glee, in his notes, or in stray passages in 
his dissertations themselves, does he seize every oppor- 
tunity of adding to the proofs that speculation in 
general has been largely affected by the stream of 
specific Scottish thought — quoting, for example, the 
saying of Scaliger, " Les Ecossois sont bons Philosophes ; " 
or dwelling on the fact that at one time almost every 
continental university had a Scottish professorship of 
philosophy, specially so named ; or reviving the memo- 
ries of defunct Balfours, and Duncans, and Chalmerses, 
and Dalgarnos, and other " Scoti extra Scotiam agentes " 
of other centuries ; or startling his readers with such 
genealogical facts as that Immanuel Kant and Sir 
Isaac Newton had Scottish grandfathers, and that the 
celebrated French metaphysician Destutt Tracy was, in 
reality, but a transmogrified Scotchman of the name of' 
Stott ! We know few things more refreshing than 
such evidences of strong national feeling in such a 
man. It is the Scottish Stagirite not ashamed of the 

1 Sir William died in 1856, four years after this was written. 



92 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

bonnet and plaid ; it is the philosopher in whose veins 
flows the blood of a Covenanter. 

Even now, when Scotchmen, their native country- 
having been so long merged in the higher unity of Great 
Britain, labour altogether in the service of this higher 
unity, and forget or set aside the smaller, they are still 
liable to be affected characteristically in all that they do 
by the consciousness that they are Scotchmen. This 
will be found true whether we regard those Scotchmen 
who work side by side with Englishmen in the conduct 
of British public affairs or British commerce, or those 
Scotchmen who vie with Englishmen in the walks of 
British authorship and literature. In either case the 
Scotchman is distinguished from the Englishman by 
this, that he carries the consciousness of his nationality 
about with him. Were he, indeed, disposed to forget 
it, the banter on the subject to which he is perpetually 
exposed in the society of his English friends and 
acquaintances would serve to keep him in mind of it. 
It is the same now with the individual Scotchman cast 
among Englishmen as it was with the Scottish nation 
when it had to defend its frontier against the English 
armies. He is in the position of a smaller body placed 
in contact with a larger one, and rendered more con- 
scious of his individuality by the constant necessity of 
asserting it. But this self-assertion of a Scotchman 
among Englishmen, this constant feeling " I am a 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 03 

Scotchman," rests, like the feeling of nationality itself, 
on a prior assertion of what is in fact a negative. 
For a Scotchman to be always thinking " I am a 
Scotchman " is, in the circumstances now under view, 
tantamount to always thinking '* I am not an English- 
man." The Englishman, on the other hand, has no 
corresponding feeling. As a member of the larger body, 
whose corporate activity has always been positive rather 
than negative, the Englishman simply acts out har- 
moniously his English instincts and tendencies, the 
feeling of not being a Scotchman never (except in the 
case of a stray Englishman located in Scotland) either 
spontaneously remaining in his mind or being roused in 
it by banter. The Scotchman who works in the general 
field of British activity has his thoughts conditioned, 
to some extent at least, by the negative of not being 
an Englishman ; the Englishman thinks under no such 
limitation. 

This leads us to a more intimate definition of the 
peculiarity of Scottish as compared with English 
thought. The rudest and most natural form of what 
we have called the Scotticism of Scotchmen consists, 
we have hitherto been saying, in simple consciousness 
of nationality, simple amor Scotice, or, in more restricted 
circumstances, the simple feeling of not being an 
Englishman. There are some Scotchmen, however, in 
whom this first and most natural form of Scotticism is 



94 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

not very well pronounced, and who are either emanci- 
pated from it, or think that they are. "We know not a 
few Scots who have really succeeded in transferring 
their enthusiastic regards from Scotland to the higher 
unity of Great Britain — men who, sometimes speaking 
in their own Scottish accent, sometimes in an accent 
almost purely English, find the objects of their soli- 
citude and admiration, not in the land lying north of 
the Tweed, but rather in England, with her rich green 
parks and fields, her broad ecclesiastical hierarchy, her 
noble halls of learning, her majestic and varied litera- 
ture, the full and generous character of her manly 
people. We know Scotchmen whose sentiment is more 
deeply stirred by Shakespeare's famous apostrophe to 
* this England " than by Scott's to the land of brown 
heath and shaggy wood. And, as Scotland and Eng- 
land are now united, such men are becoming more 
numerous. But even they shall not escape. If their 
native quality of Scotticism does not survive in them 
in the more palpable and open form of mere national 
feeling, mere amor Scotice, it survives, nevertheless, in 
an intellectual habit, having the same root, and as 
indestructible. And what is this habit ? The popular 
charges of dogmatism, opinionativeness, pugnacity, and 
the like, brought against Scotchmen by Englishmen, 
are so many approximations to a definition of it. Eor 
our part, we should say that the special habit or 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 95 

peculiarity which distinguishes the intellectual mani- 
festations of Scotchmen — that, in short, in which the 
Scotticism of Scotchmen most intimately consists — is 
the habit of emphasis. All Scotchmen are emphatic. 
If a Scotchman is a fool, he gives such emphasis to the 
nonsense he utters as to be considerably more insufferable 
than a fool of any other country ; if a Scotchman is a 
man of genius, he gives such emphasis to the good 
things he has to communicate that they have a su- 
premely good chance of being at once or very soon 
attended to. This habit of emphasis is exactly that 
perfervidum ingenium Scotorum which used to be re- 
marked some centuries ago wherever Scotchmen were 
known. But emphasis is perhaps a better word than 
fervour. Many Scotchmen are fervid too, but not all ; 
but all, absolutely all, are emphatic. No one will call 
Joseph Hume a fervid man, but he is certainly em- 
phatic. And so with David Hume, or Eeid, or Adam 
Smith, or any of those colder-natured Scotchmen of 
whom we have spoken. Fervour cannot be predicated 
of them, but they had plenty of emphasis, In men like 
Burns, or Chalmers, or Irving, on the other hand, there 
was both emphasis and fervour ; so also with Carlyle ; 
and so, in a still more curious combination, with Sir 
William Hamilton. And, as we distinguish emphasis 
from fervour, so would we distinguish it from per- 
severance. Scotchmen are said to be persevering, but 



96 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

the saying is not universally true. Scotchmen are or 
are not morally persevering, but all Scotchmen are in- 
tellectually emphatic. Emphasis, we repeat, intellectual 
emphasis, the habit of laying stress on certain things 
rather than co-ordinating all : in this consists what is 
essential in the Scotticism of Scotchmen. And, as this 
observation is empirically verified by the very manner 
in which Scotchmen enunciate their words in ordinary 
talk, so it might be deduced scientifically from what 
has been said regarding the nature and effects of the 
feeling of nationality. The habit of thinking empha- 
tically is a necessary result of thinking much in the 
presence of, and in resistance to, a negative ; it is the 
habit of a people that has been accustomed to act on 
the defensive, rather than of a people peacefully self- 
evolved and accustomed to act positively; it is the 
habit of Protestantism rather than of Catholicism, of 
Presbyterianism rather than of Episcopacy, of Dissent 
rather than of Conformity. 

The greatest effects which the Scottish mind has yet 
produced on the world (and these effects, by the con- 
fession of Englishmen themselves, have not been small) 
have been the results, in part at least, of this national 
habit of emphasis. Until towards the close of last 
century, the special department of labour in which 
Scotchmen had, to any great extent, exerted themselves 
so as to make a figure in the general intellectual world, 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 07 



was the department of Philosophy, metaphysical arid 
dialectic. Their triumphs in this department are his- 
torical. What is called the Scottish Philosophy con- 
stitutes, in the eyes of all who know anything of 
history, a most important stage in the intellectual 
evolution of modern Europe. Prom the time of those 
old Duncans, Balfours, and Dalgarnos, mentioned by 
Sir "William Hamilton, who discoursed on philosophy, 
and wrote dialectical treatises in Latin in all the cities 
of the Continent, down to our own days, one can point 
to a succession of Scottish thinkers in whom the interest 
in metaphysical studies was kept alive, and by whose 
labours new contributions to mental science were con- 
tinually made. It was by the Scottish mind, in fact, 
that the modern philosophy was conducted to that 
point where Kant and the Germans took it up. The 
qualifications of the Scottish mind for this task were, 
doubtless, various. Perhaps there was something in 
that special combination of the Celtic and the Scan- 
dinavian out of which the Scottish nation, for the most 
part, took its rise, to produce an aptitude for dialectical 
exercises. Farther, it would not be altogether fanciful 
to suppose that those very national struggles of the 
Scotch in the course of which they acquired so strong a 
sense of their national individuality — that is, of the 
distinction between all that was Scotch and all that 
was not Scotch — served, in a rough way, to facilitate 

H 



98 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

for all Scotchmen that fundamental idea of the dis- 
tinction between the Ego and the Non-Ego the clear 
and rigorous apprehension of which is the first step in 
philosophy and the one test of the philosopher. In a 
still more important respect, however, one might trace 
the success of the Scottish mind in philosophy to the 
national habit of intellectual emphasis. A Scotchman, 
when he thinks, cannot so easily and comfortably as 
the Englishman repose on an upper level of propositions 
co-ordinated for him by tradition, sweet feeling, and 
pleasant circumstance. That necessity of his nature 
which leads him to emphasise certain things, rather 
than to take all things together in their established co- 
ordination, drives him down and still down in search of 
certain generalities whereon he may see that all can be 
built. It was this habit of emphasis, this inability to 
rest on the level of sweetly-composed experience, that 
led Hume to scepticism ; it was the same habit, the 
same inability, conjoined with more of faith and re- 
verence, that • led Eeid to lay down in the chasm of 
Hume's scepticism certain blocks of ultimate proposi- 
tions or principles, capable of being individually enu- 
merated, and yet, as he thought, forming a sufficient 
basement for all that men think or believe. And the 
same tendency is visible among Scotchmen now. It 
amazes Scotchmen at the present day to see on what 
proximate propositions even Englishmen who are cele- 



BRITISH LITERA TUBE. 5)9 

brated as thinkers can rest their speculations. The 
truth is that, if Scotchmen have, so far, a source of 
superiority over Englishmen in their "habit of dwelling 
only on the emphatic, they have also in this same habit 
a source of inferiority. Quietism, mysticism, that: soft, 
meditative disposition which takes things for granted 
in the co-ordination established by mere life and usage, 
pouring into the confusion thus externally given the 
oil of an abounding inner joy, interpenetrating all and 
harmonizing all — these are, for the most part, alien 
to the Scotchman. His walk is not by the meadows, 
the wheat fields, the green lanes, and the ivy-clad 
parish churches, where all is gentle, and antique, and 
fertile, but by the bleak sea-shore which parts the 
certain from the limitless, where there is doubt in the 
seamewT shriek, and where it is well if in the ad- 
vancing tide he can find footing on a rock among the 
tangle. But this very tendency of his towards what is 
intellectually extreme injures his sense of proportion in 
what is concrete and actual ; and hence it is that, when 
he leaves the field of abstract thought, and betakes 
himself to creative literature, he so seldom produces 
anything comparable, in fulness, wealth, and harmo- 
niousness, to the imaginations of a Chaucer or a Shake- 
speare. The highest genius, indeed, involves also the 
capability of the intellectually extreme, and, accord- 
ingly, in the writings of those great Englishmen, just as 

H 2 



100 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 



in those of the living English poet Tennyson, there are 
strokes in abundance of that pure intellectual emphasis 
in which the Scotchman delights ; but then there is 
also with them such a genial acceptance of all things, 
great or small, in their established co-ordination that 
the flashes of emphasis are as if they came not from a 
battle done on an open moor, but from a battle trans- 
acting itself in the depths of a forest. Among Scottish 
thinkers, Mackintosh is the one that approaches nearest 
to the English model ; and this may be accounted fop 
by the fact that much of what he did consisted, from 
the necessities of the object-matter of his speculations, 
in judicious compromise. 

But even in the field of literature we need not abandon 
the Scotchman. His habit of emphasis has here enabled 
him to do good service too. His entry on this field, 
however, was later than his entry on the field of phi- 
losophy. True, there had been, contemporary with the 
Scottish philosophers, or even anterior to them, Scottish 
poets and general prose-writers of note — Dunbar, 
Gawain Douglas, King James I., of Scotland, Bu- 
chanan, Sir David Lindsay, Henryson, Drummond, 
Allan Bamsay, and the like. True, also, in those 
snatches of popular ballad and song which came down 
from generation to generation in Scotland — many of 
them written by no one knows whom, and almost all 
of them overflowing with either humour or melancholy 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 101 

— there was at once a fountain and a promise of an 
exquisite national literature. One can think of old 
Mcol Burn, the "violer," out on his rounds in the 
Yarrow district, and singing as he played: — 

" But Minstrel Burn cannot assuage 

His woes while time endureth, 
To see the changes of this age 

Which fleeting time procureth. 
Full many a place stands in hard case 

Where joy was wont beforrow, 
With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes, 

And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow." 

There was literature in the times when such old strains 
were sung. But the true avatar of the Scottish mind 
in modern literature came later than the manifestation 
of the same mind in philosophy. Were we to fix a 
precise date for it, we should name the period of 
Burns's first visit to Edinburgh and familiar meetings 
with the men of literary talent and distinction then 
assembled there. 

Edinburgh was, indeed, even then a literary capital, 
boasting of its Monboddos, Stewarts, Bobertsons, Blairs, 
Mackenzies, and Gregorys, men who had already 
begun the race of literary rivalry with their contem- 
poraries south of the Tweed. But, so far as the lite- 
rary excellence of these men did not depend on their 
participation in that tendency to abstract thinking 



102 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN 

which had already produced its special fruit in the 
Scottish Philosophy, it consisted in little more than a 
reflection or imitation of what was already common and 
acknowledged in the prior or contemporary literature 
of South Britain. To write essays such as those of the 
Spectator ; to be master of a style which Englishmen 
should pronounce pure, and to produce compositions in 
that style worthy of being ranked with the compositions 
of English authors : such was the aim and aspiration of 
Edinburgh literati between whom and their London 
cousins there was all the difference that there is 
between the latitude of Edinburgh and the latitude of 
London, between the daily use of the broad Scotch 
dialect and the daily use of the classic English. 
For Scotland this mere imitation of English models 
was a poor and unsatisfactory vein of literary enterprise. 
What was necessary was the appearance of some man 
of genius who should flash through all that, and who, 
by the application to literature, or the art of universal 
expression, of that same Scottish habit of emphasis 
which had already produced such striking and original 
results in philosophy, should teach the Scottish nation 
its true power in literature, and show a first example of 
it. Such a man was Burns. He it was who, uniting 
emotional fervour with intellectual emphasis, and draw- 
ing his inspiration from all those depths of sentiment 
in the Scottish people which his predecessors, the 



BRITISH LITERATURE. 103 



philosophers, had hardly so much as touched, struck for 
the first time a new chord, and revealed for the first 
time what a Scottish writer could do by trusting to 
the whole wealth of Scottish resources. From the time 
of Burns, accordingly, there has been a series of eminent 
literary Scotchmen quite different from that series 
of hard logical Scotchmen who had till then been the 
most conspicuous representatives of their country in the 
eyes of the reading public of Great Britain— a series of 
Scotchmen displaying the power of emphatic sentiment 
and emphatic expression as strikingly as their pre- 
decessors had displayed the power of emphatic reason- 
ing. While the old philosophic energy of Scotland 
still remained unexhausted — the honours of Eeid. 
Hume, Smith, and Stewart passing on to such men 
as Brown, Mill, Mackintosh, and Hamilton (in favour 
of the last of whom even Germany has paused in her 
philosophic interregnum) — the special literary energy 
which had been awakened in the country descended 
along another line in the persons of Scott, Jeffrey, 
Chalmers, Campbell, Wilson, and Carlyle. Considering 
the amount of influence exerted by such men upon 
the whole spirit and substance of British literature, 
considering how large a share of the whole literary 
produce of Great Britain in the nineteenth century 
has come either from them or from other Scotchmen, 
and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks 



104 SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE. 

all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish 
origin, are we not entitled to say that the rise and 
growth of recent Scottish literature is as notable a 
historical phenomenon as the rise and growth of 
the Scottish philosophy? Considering, moreover, how 
lately Scotland has entered on this literary field, how 
little time she has had to display her powers, how 
recently she was in this respect savage, and how much 
of her savage vitality yet remains to be articulated 
in civilized books, may we not hope that her literary 
avatar is but beginning and has a goodly course yet 
to run ? From Solway to Caithness we hear a loud 
Amen. 



III. 

THE LIFE AND POETRY OF SHELLEY. 



III. 

THE LIFE AND POETRY OF SHELLEY.* 

Celebrated for many a transaction belonging to the 
history of Italy, the fifty miles of Italian coast which 
lie between Leghorn in Tuscany and Spezzia in the 
Sardinian states possess also, in virtue of certain 
events of which they were the scene in the summer 
of 1822, a peculiar interest in -connexion with British 
poetry. 

Byron and Shelley were then both living there. 
Voluntary exiles, for similar reasons, from their native 
land, and already personally known to each other, they 
had been residing separately for several years in dif- 
ferent parts of Italy ; during the few immediately pre- 
ceding months they had been living in the same town 
of Pisa, seeing each other daily, and becoming better 
acquainted with each other; and now again they had 

1 Macmillawts Magazine, September 1860. 



108 . SHELLEY. 



just parted — Byron to take up his summer-quarters at 
Leghorn, and Shelley his at a lonely spot near Lerici, 
in the Gulf of Spezzia. The two poets were thus, for 
the time, separated by the whole distance of the fifty 
intervening miles. A circumstance which made their 
separation rather unfortunate at the moment was that 
a third English poet — Mr. Leigh Hunt — was then on 
his way to Italy to join them. While Byron and 
Shelley were still together at Pisa, it had been arranged 
that Mr. Hunt should come out to them, and that the 
three should start a political and literary periodical 
which Byron had projected, and which, published at 
Lisa, should electrify Europe. Now that Byron and 
Shelley had separated, the arrangement had to be 
modified. Mr. Hunt was to join Lord Byron at 
Leghorn ; they were to be the active partners in the 
periodical; and Shelley was but to visit them now 
and then, and help them as much as he could from 
his retreat at Lerici. Nor did the fifty miles of dis- 
tance matter very much. Both Byron and Shelley 
were passionately fond of the sea ; and yachting in 
that lovely bit of the Mediterranean was one of the 
pleasures that made them prefer Italy to England. 
Byron had just bought a beautiful craft, built like a 
man-of-war brig, to lie in Leghorn harbour, and be 
ready at a moment's notice to carry him and his 
friends Boberts and Trelawny wherever they chose; 



SHELLEY. 109 



and Shelley, according to his more modest tastes and 
means, had procured a small open pleasure-boat, to 
lie on the beach under the hill which rose behind his 
solitary house, and to carry himself, Mrs. Shelley, and 
any friend that might chance to visit them, along the 
Bay of Spezzia, or even southward, at a stretch, as 
far as Leghorn. With such means of communication, 
there was little fear but that Byron, Hunt, and Shelley 
would be often together ! Byron's dangerous-looking 
craft, the Bolivar, showing her brazen teeth through her 
miniature port-holes, would often be cruising north- 
wards in the direction of Spezzia, and Shelley's white- 
sailed boat would be seen coyly tacking to meet her ; 
and, in the course of a month or two, the Italian pre- 
ventive-men along the shore would know both well as 
the vessels of the English poet-lord and his mysterious 
fellow-countryman ! Alas ! and, to this day [1860], if 
we consider only what was historically possible, those 
two vessels or their successors might still have been 
cruising familiarly, each with its owner aboard, on 
the same tract of sea! Leigh Hunt, the oldest of the 
three poets, was alive among us but a few months ago, 
at the age of seventy- five ; had Byron lived, he would 
now have been seventy-two; Shelley, had he lived, 
would have been sixty -eight. In the summer of 
which we speak Leigh Hunt was in his thirty-ninth 
year, Byron in his thirty-fifth, Shelley in his thirtieth. 



110 SHELLEY. 

Looking at Shelley, as we can fancy him standing on 
the beach at Lerici, what do we see ? A man still 
yonng, rather tall, but bent a little at the shoulders 
from weakness — with a very small head, and hair 
naturally dark-brown and curling, but now prematurely 
tinged with grey ; the face also singularly small, with a 
pale or pinkish-pale complexion, large spiritual-looking 
eyes, very delicate features, and an expression altogether 
graceful, etherial, and feminine. Could we hear him 
speak, the impression would be completed by his voice. 
This is described as having been very high and shrill, so 
that some one who heard it unexpectedly in a mixed 
company compared it to the scream of a peacock. On 
the whole, seen or heard even for the first time, he was 
a man to excite a feeling of interest, and a curiosity as 
to his previous history. 

Born the heir to an English baronetcy, and to more 
than the usual wealth and consideration attending that 
rank, the whole life of Shelley had been a war against 
custom. At Eton the sensitive boy, almost girlish in 
his look and demeanour, had nerved himself, with meek 
obstinacy, though with secret tears, against every part 
of the established system — not only against the tyranny 
of his fellows, but also against the teaching of the 
masters. It had been the same when he went to 
Oxford. He was then a Greek scholar, a writer of 
verses, an insatiable student of the metaphysics of 



SHELLEY. Ill 



Berkeley and Hume, an incessant reasoner with any 
one that would reason with him on points of philosophy 
or politics, and in every such argument an avowed 
Kevolutionist, and at least a hypothetical Atheist. In 
the rooms of his college, or along the streets, his shrill 
voice might be heard attacking Christianity, Eeligion, 
the very idea of a God. He was frantically earnest on 
this subject, as if, by compelling discussion of it, he 
were digging at the root of all evil. At length, tired 
of merely talking with his acquaintances, he sent a 
printed statement of his opinions to the University 
authorities, challenging them to an argument with him 
as to the necessity or utility of any religious belief. 
The act was ghastly, and the reply of the authorities 
was his instant expulsion from the University. His 
family were shocked, and could not tell what to make 
of such a youth ; and, at the age of seventeen, he re- 
moved to London to live as his own master. There he 
printed and privately distributed a numbers of copies 
of his Queen Mab, expanding and illustrating the 
poetical Atheism of the text in appended prose notes. 
He introduced himself by letter to men and women of 
genius, trying to enlist them in the great war which he 
had begun, and into which he thought the whole intel- 
lectual world must follow, against Statecraft and Priest- 
craft. He read with avidity Godwin's " Political Justice " 
— in the doctrines of which book he found a new social 



112 SHELLEY. 



gospel ; and lie resolved from that hour to square all 
his actions by what he considered strict justice, without 
reference to the opinions of others. At this time he 
had, by arrangement with his family, about 2001. a 
year ; which income he was able to increase, by borrow- 
ing on his expectations, or in other ways. His own 
manner of living was extremely temperate ; indeed, for 
several years he was a vegetarian in diet and drank only 
water. He had thus money to spend on objects that 
moved his charity. He was continually in quest of 
such objects. Every social anomaly, almost every social 
inequality, affected him intensely. If he saw a shiver- 
ing beggar in the street asking alms beside a carriage, 
his longing was nothing less than to add the beggar and 
the carriage together on the spot and divide the sum by 
two. The sole use of his own money seemed to him to 
be to mitigate, as far as he could, these social inequalities. 
He did the most extraordinary and the most generous 
things. To give away twenty or thirty pounds, where 
he fancied it would relieve distress, was nothing to him. 
He involved himself in debt and serious inconvenience 
by repetitions of such acts of benevolence. Nor was it 
only with money that he was generous. His society, 
his sympathy, beyond the range of the intellectual 
occupations in which he delighted, were given, by pre- 
ference, to the outcast and the wretched. It was in the 
same spirit of contempt for usage that, when, in his 



SHELLEY. 113 



twentieth year, his affections were engaged, he 
married the object of them — the daughter of a retired 
tradesman. After three years of married life, spent in 
different places, and latterly not happily, he and his 
wife had separated by mutual consent, she returning 
with her two children to her father's house. Shellev 

id 

then formed the new connexion which ended in his 
second marriage, and went abroad to travel. On his 
return he resided for eighteen months in London — his 
fortune increased about this time, by his grandfather's 
death, to 1,000/. a year; which continued to be his 
income as long as he lived. This was the time too of 
bis becoming acquainted with Leigh Hunt, and, through 
him, with Keats. One of his first acts on becoming 
acquainted with Leigh Hunt was to offer him 100Z. ; 
and Mr. Hunt himself has recorded that this was but 
the beginning of a series of kindnesses almost unprece- 
dented in the annals of friendship. On one occasion 
of exigency he gave Hunt 1,400/. It was while Shelley 
was residing in London in 1815 that Alastor, or The 
Spirit of /Solitude was composed. Early in 181,6 he 
and his companion again went abroad. They resided 
for about a year and a half in Switzerland and 
in Italy. It was in Switzerland that they had 
first become acquainted with Lord Byron, who was 
then living there. On their return to England they 
went to Bath ; and here it was that Shelley received the 

I 



114 SHELLEY. 



terrible news of the suicide of his wife. To the horror 
of the event itself was added the public scandal which 
followed when the relatives of the unhappy woman 
instituted a suit in Chancery to prevent Shelley from 
taking back his children. They grounded their suit on 
the fact that Shelley was an avowed Atheist. On this, 
as in itself a sufficiently legal plea, Lord Chancellor 
Elclon gave judgment in their favour. As far as the 
newspapers could carry the report of the trial, the 
name and the antecedents of "the Atheist Shelley" had 
thus been blazoned over Britain. "When the judgment 
was given, Shelley was residing with his second wife — 
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — at Great Marlow in 
Buckinghamshire. Here he had organised a regular 
system of charity. He had pensioners among the 
agricultural labourers and the poor silk-weavers all 
round ; he even studied medicine, and walked the 
hospitals in London, that he might be of use to the 
sick. But neither in Great Marlow, nor anywhere else 
in England, could the philanthropy of a man who bore 
the brand of Atheist be trusted or tolerated. His very 
pensioners shrank from him, and took his money sus- 
piciously. Strongly sensitive to such distrust, and 
fearing also future interferences of the law of England 
with his liberty, he had resolved, if even at the sacrifice 
of all his rights of inheritance to the family property, 
to leave England for ever. In the spring of 1818 he 



SHELLEY. 115 



had carried out the resolution by going to Italy. Before 
leaving England, he had written his Revolt of Islam, 
and many other pieces of verse and prose which now 
appear in his collected works ; but the four years that 
had elapsed since his arrival in Italy had been the 
period of what are now esteemed his finest productions. 
During those four years — residing at Venice, at Eome, 
at Naples, at Florence, and finally, as we have seen, at 
Pisa — he had written his Prometheus Unbound, his 
Cenci, his Hellas, his Julian and Maddalo y his Epi- 
psychidion, his Witch of A Has, his Ode to Naples, and his 
Adonais, besides his translations in prose and verse 
from Plato, Calderon, the Homeric poets, and Goethe. 
During the same period, also, he had begun to take a 
more direct interest than before in the current politics 
of Britain and of Europe — working down his general 
doctrines respecting Man and Society into strong 
Eadical lyrics, and satires on the Liverpool and Castle- 
reagh administration, calculated to do rough service at 
home ; and throwing much of his energy simultaneously 
into what we now call the cause of the oppressed 
nationalities. He had, indeed, a passion for being 
practical, and had recently spent a great deal of 
money on an attempt, which did not succeed, to 
establish a steamboat between Leghorn and Mar- 
seilles. 

Such, from his birth, had been the twenty-nine years 

I 2 



116 SHELLEY. 



of wandering, of wild clamour and agony, of fitful 
ecstasy of mind and heart, that had brought the poet, 
a kind of intellectual outcast, to his Salvator-Eosa 
solitude under the pine-hills of Spezzia, sloping to 
the sea. Part of all this past life of error and suffer- 
ing (for time is merciful) had, doubtless, been left 
behind, melted and softened in the thin air of recol- 
lection ; but part remained incorporate in the very 
being of the sufferer, not to be dissolved away even 
by the Italian sun, or soothed by the softness of the 
bluest heaven. 

What proportion of the past had faded, and what re- 
mained, it might be difficult to say. Among the things 
that had faded, one might say with some certainty, was 
the early crudity of his exulting Atheism. 

Even at first, had not Shelley himself assumed the 
name of Atheist, and employed it as a signature, and 
shrieked it wherever he went, and seemed sometimes to 
riot in the very horror it produced, it may be doubted 
whether, from any study of his poems, the name would 
ever have been attached to him. He would have been 
named, much more probably, a Pantheist, a Platonist, 
or the like. A recognition of the supernatural, of at 
least a spirit of intellectual beauty as pervading all 
visible things, of human life as but an evanescent in car- 
nation and short local battle of principles that have their 
origin behind time and beyond the stars, seems the one 



SHELLEY. 117 



characteristic of Shelley's poetry from the first, which 
if we do not attend to, it has no logical coherence. In 
all otir literature it would be difficult to find a soul that 
was less the soul of a Secularist. Only remember, in 
contrast with him, Bunyan's typical Atheist in the 
" Pilgrim's Progress." Christian and Hopeful are there 
toiling along on their road across a great plain, when 
they perceive afar off one coming softly and all alone 
meeting them, with his back towards that part of the 
horizon behind which was the Zion to which they were 
bound. This is " Atheist," who, when he comes up to 
them, announces to them, with a leering positiveness, 
that it is all a mistake — that there is no God and no 
Zion, and that they may as well go back with him, and 
snap their thumbs at being rid once for all of that 
troublesome delusion. Not so, certainly, at any time 
with Shelley ! If he denies Zion and Christianity, and 
assails Christian and Hopeful for believing in them, it 
is as one walking, with mad eagerness, while he does 
so, in the same direction with them, scanning as intently 
the distant sky, and blaspheming sideways in their ears 
what he does not see, not because his eyes have ceased 
one moment to look for it, but out of a wild sorrow 
that it is not to be seen. A gleam, and one fancies he 
would falter in the middle of his talk, he would start 
and shade his eyes to gaze, he would fall to the ground 
weeping ! Now, although there is no evidence that the 



118 SHELLEY. 



gleam ever came, though he still in his later years, as 
in his earlier, kept talking sideways at Christian and 
Hopeful in language which made them shudder, yet 
not only did he not cease to hurry on with them, but 
the very language of his sarcasm underwent a modi- 
fication. Mr. Browning has stated it as his belief that, 
had Shelley lived, he would have ranged himself finally 
with the Christians. I do not feel that we are entitled 
to say so much as this ; for his latest letters show, I 
think, that much of what had been accounted, in this 
respect, the darkest peculiarity of his life, still remained 
with him. 

Of what else remained that which was perhaps most 
obvious to those about him was the shattered state of 
his nerves. Always of weak health, nothing but his 
temperate habits could have kept him alive so long; 
and now he was often racked by a pulmonary pain, 
which seemed to augur that, in any case, he had not 
many years to live. But, beyond this, the morbid 
nervous excitement induced by such a life as his had 
been had begun to manifest itself in that abnormal 
action of the senses which makes men subject to 
visions, apparitions, and the terrors of waking dream. 
Various instances of such hallucinations, or nervous 
paroxysms, are recorded by his biographers. Thus, 
while he was staying at Oreat Mario w, he alarmed 
his friends and the neighbourhood by a story of a 



SHELLEY. 119 



fight he had had with a burglar who had tried to 
murder him in the night ; for which story, it is believed 
by some, there was no foundation in fact. So also, 
as some believe, with the story which he told of an 
Englishman coming up to him at the Post-office at Pisa, 
when he was inquiring for his letters, and knocking 
him down, with an oath, as "that Atheist Shelley." 
But the most extraordinary instance is that recorded 
in the diary of Captain Williams as having happened 
at Lerici itself during the very days of his last residence 
there. " Monday, May 6th," writes Captain Williams, 
"after tea, walking with Shelley on the terrace, and 
"observing the effect of moonshine on the waters, he 
" complained of being unusually nervous ; and, stopping 
" short, he grasped me violently by the arm, and stared 
"stedfastly on the white surf that broke upon the 
" beach under our feet. Observing him sensibly affected, 
" I demanded of him if he were in pain. But he only 
" answered by saying ' There it is again — there ! ' He 
" recovered after some time, and declared, that he saw, 
" as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child rise from 
" the sea and clap its hands as in joy, smiling at him." 
This was on the 6th of May, 1822. Two months after- 
wards the omen was fulfilled. 

Towards the end of June the news came that Leigh 
Hunt had arrived in Genoa, and was on his way to 
Leghorn. Shelley and Williams, who had been busy 



120 SHELLEY. 

with their new boat, resolved to set out in her to 
welcome Hunt. The weather had been overpower- 
ingly hot, and the sea swollen and louring ; but on 
the 1st of July a fine breeze sprang up, and they 
weighed for Leghorn. They performed the voyage in 
seven hours and a half, and anchored that night in 
Leghorn harbour beside the Bolivar, on board of which 
they slept. Next day, and for five days more, there 
were greetings of Hunt and his family, journeys with 
them and Byron to Pisa and other places, and much 
talk about the prospects of the new periodical. Un- 
luckily, on account of some fray in Byron's house, 
which had brought an Italian servant of his within 
the grip of the Tuscan police, his Lordship had taken 
a sudden determination to leave Tuscany; and Shelley's 
chief care was to get such arrangements made as would 
prevent Hunt from being inconvenienced by this change 
of plan. He did all he could to secure this ; and on the 
8th of July, taking leave of Hunt, Byron, and others, 
he and Williams set out on their return to Lerici. An 
English sailor lad, named Charles Vivian, accompanied 
them in the boat. There were some fears for the 
weather, which for some days had been calm and 
sultry, but was now changed ; but Shelley could not 
be persuaded to remain. The boat had not gone many 
miles, when one of the terrible squalls that occur in 
that part of the Mediterranean came on, and the friends 



SHELLEY. 121 

left at Leghorn became anxious. Captain Roberts, who 
had been watching the boat on her homeward track 
with a glass from Leghorn lighthouse, saw her last, 
when the storm came on, off Via Eeggio, at some 
distance from the shore, hugging the wind with a 
press of canvas. The storm then spread rapidly like 
a dark mist, and blotted out that part of the horizon, 
enveloping the distant little boat and several larger 
vessels that were also out. When the storm passed on- 
wards from that quarter, Captain Eoberts looked again, 
and saw every vessel except the little one, which had 
vanished. Within that storm had been the apparition 

of the naked babe ! For days and days there was 

great anxiety among the friends on shore. At length 
the sea itself told all that ever was to be known of the 
mystery, by washing ashore the three bodies — that of 
Shelley, that of Williams, and that of the boy Vivian 
— on different parts of the coast. The body of Shelley 
was burnt on a pyre of wood, heaped with wine, salt, 
frankincense, and perfumes, near the spot where it had 
been cast ashore, Byron, Hunt, Trelawny and others 
assisting at the ceremony. The collected ashes were 
conveyed to Eome and there buried. 

Whatever rank one may be disposed to assign, all in 
all, to Shelley among English Poets, no reader can deny 
that his genius was of the poetical order, that he pos- 



122 SHELLEY. 



sessed in a singular degree the faculty of ideality, of 
pure imagination. His larger poems are well and even 
carefully conceived as wholes, according to the peculiar 
kind of constructive art of which they are specimens. 
The language is logically precise, easy, graceful, and 
luxuriant; the versification is natural, various, and 
musical; and there are individual passages of acute 
and even comprehensive philosophical meaning, of 
powerful and delicate description, of weirdly and ex- 
quisite phantasy, and of tender and concentrated feel- 
iug. In his descriptions and visual fancies one notices, 
among other things, a wonderfully fine sense of colour. 
Thus Asia, in the Prometheus Unbound, expecting, in a 
vale of the Indian Caucasus, the arrival of her sister 
Oceanid, Panthea : — 

" This is the season, this the day, the hour ; 
At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine. 
Too long denied, too long delaying, come ! 
The point of one white star is quivering still, 
Deep in the orange light of widening morn 
Beyond the purple mountains. Through a chasm 
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake 
Eeflects it : now it wanes : it gleams again 
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads 
Of woven cloud unravel in the thin air : 
'Tis lost ; and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow 
The roseate sunlight quivers : hear I not 
The iEolian music of her sea-green plumes 
Winnowing the crimson dawn ? " 



SHELLEY. 123 



Perhaps one of the finest continuous passages in all the 
larger poems is the concluding portion of the same 
drama, where, partly in choruses of unseen spirits, and 
partly in dialogue between Prometheus and the Oceanids 
in a forest near his cave, the glorious state of the eman- 
cipated world of the Promethean era, when Jove is 
dethroned, and Love and Justice reign, is set forth in 
mystic allegory. The following speech of Panthea may 
serve as a specimen of the part that is in dialogue. The 
new or Promethean earth is figured by the vision of a 
vast solid sphere, as of crystal, filled with multitudinous 
shapes and colours, yet all miraculously inter-tran- 
spicuous, which is seen rushing, as in a whirlwind of 
harmony, through an opening of the forest, grinding, as 
it wheels, a brook that flows beneath into an azure mist 
of light, and whirling grass, trees, and flowers into a 
kneaded mass of aerial emerald. Within this strange 
orb the Spirit of the Earth is seen asleep, like a wearied 
child, pillowed on its alabaster arms, which are laid over 
its folded wings. Its lips are seen moving as in a 
smiling dream ; and from a star upon its forehead there 
shoot swords and beams of fire, which whirl as the orb 
whirls, and transpierce its otherwise opaque bulk with 
radiant lightnings. In the light of these incessant shafts 
all the secrets of the earth's interior, from the circum- 
ference to the core, are revealed in continuous trans- 
lucence : — 



124 SHELLEY. 



" Infinite mines of adamant and gold, 
Valueless glories, unimagined gems, 
And caverns on crystalline columns poised, 
With vegetable silver overspread ; 
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water-springs 
Whence the great sea,' even as a child, is fed, 
Whose vapours clothe earth's monarch mountain-tops 
With kingly ermine-snow. The beams flash on 
And make appear the melancholy ruins 
Of cancelled cycles — anchors, beaks of ships, 
Planks turned to marble, quivers, helms, and spears, 
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels 
Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry 
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts — 
Eound which death laughed ; sepulchred emblems 
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin ! 
The wrecks beside of many a city vast 
Whose population which the earth grew over 
Was mortal, but not human : see, they lie, 
Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons, 
Their statues, homes and fanes — prodigious shapes 
Huddled in grey annihilation, split, 
Jammed in the hard black deep ; and, over these, 
The anatomies of unknown winged things, 
And fishes which were isles of living scale, 
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around 
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust 
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs 
Had crushed the iron crags ; and over these 
The jagged alligator, and the might 
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once 
Were monarch-beasts, and on the slimy shores 
And weed-overgrown continents of earth 



SHELLEY. 125 



Increased and multiplied like, summer-worms 
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe 
Wrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and they 
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished ; or some God 
Whose throne was in a comet passed and cried 
' Be not,' and, like my words, they were no more." 

Passages in a different vein might be quoted, as these 
lines of apophthegm in the " Cenci : " — 

" In the great war between the young and old 
I, who have white hairs and a tottering body, 
Will keep at least blameless neutrality ; " 

or this fine image : — 

" Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity." 

In some of the rougher political poems — : as in the 
burlesque of CEdipus Tyrannus, and in Peter Bell the 
Third — there is even a kind of fierce popular wit, 
appealing to the coarsest understanding, and intended 
to do so. Nor is it necessary to refer to those shorter 
lyrical pieces, The Sensitive Plant, The Cloud, the Ode 
to the Skylark, &c, which are known even to those 
who know nothing else of Shelley, and read again and 
again for their melody, 

" Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew." 

In others of these lyrical pieces what intensity of 
pathos ! Who that has ever heard Beatrice's wild song 



126 SHELLEY. 



in the "Cenei" sung as it should be can forget its 
plaintive horror ? — ■ 

" False friend, wilt thou smile or weep 
When my life is laid asleep ? 
Little cares for a smile or a tear 
The clay-cold corpse upon the bier. 

Farewell ! Heigh ho ! 

What is this whispers low ? 
There's a snake in thy smile, my dear ; 
And bitter poison within thy tear." 

After all, however, less than almost any other poet, 
is Shelley to be adequately represented in detached 
passages. His poetry is like an intellectual ether, that 
must be breathed and lived in for some time ere its 
influence can be appreciated. To minds of sufficient 
culture, who have in this way become acquainted with 
Shelley's poetry (and only minds of considerable 
culture are likely ever to read much of it), it has 
always presented itself as something very peculiar in 
quality — totally different, for example, from the poetry 
of Milton, or of Wordsworth, or of Byron, or of any 
other preceding poet. To this, at least, Shelley's poetry 
can lay claim — that, whether great or not, whether 
useful or hurtful in its influence, it is very peculiar. 

Eetaining for the nonce a distinction, somewhat pe- 
dantic in form, and greatly laughed at of late by the 
lovers of plain English (but which need not be given 



SHELLEY. 127 



up, for all that, till the lovers of plain English have 
provided an exact equivalent), one cannot do better 
than repeat the observation, often made already, that 
Shelley belongs to the order of the so-called " sub- 
jective" poets, as differing from those called the 
"objective." The terms do express a real meaning. 
There are some poets — as, for example, Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, and Scott — whose poetry consists, in the 
main, of combinations, more or less complex, of scenery, 
incident, and character, each fashioned by a kind of 
wondrous craft out of materials furnished to the ima- 
gination by sense, memory, reading, and reflection, and 
each, as soon as it is fashioned, detached altogether, 
or nearly so, from the personality of the writer, and 
sent to float away as a separate creation down the 
stream of time. In the case of these so-called " ob- 
jective" poets, it is a problem of the highest difficulty 
to ascertain the personal character from their works. 
Out of one set of materials Shakespeare fashions a 
" Hamlet ; " then he sets about a " Macbeth ; " then 
he betakes himself to a "Henry the Fourth," or a 
" Midsummer Night's Dream ; " but whether Shake- 
speare himself is most in one or in another of these 
creations, is a matter not to be lightly determined on 
mere internal evidence. We see those creations sepa- 
rately and successively issuing from Shakespeare's 
mind, and we know that they were fashioned there by 



128 SHELLEY. 



a subtle craft operating upon materials that had been 
brought into that mind from the surrounding world ; 
but what kind of chamber that mind was — of what 
glooms, griefs, or distractions it may have been the 
scene while the labour of creation was going on in 
it — the works themselves do not accurately inform us. 
For fifty years the world is amazed and delighted with 
gorgeous phantasies of colour, representing, as they 
were never represented before in painting, the phases 
of universal nature; and, when these phantasies are 
traced to their source, they are found to be from the 
hand of a taciturn and slovenly old man, named 
Turner, shambling about in his slippers in a dusty 
cobwebby house in London, and reputed by tiiose who 
knew no better to be very gruff and very avaricious, 
and to have apparently no other usual human taste 
than a fondness for port wine. Of course, even in such 
cases, independent knowledge of the man may enable 
us to discern him in his works. There are, moreover, 
for critics profound enough in their investigations, 
subtle laws connecting the imagination with the per- 
sonality and the life. But any such ultimate con- 
nexion, discovered or discoverable, between the personal 
character of the " objective " poet and the nature of 
his creations is a far different thing from the obvious 
relation subsisting between the character of the " sub- 
jective" poet and his phantasies. Here we are never 



SHELLEY. 129 



at a loss. The poetry of the "subjective" poet is 
nothing else than an effluence from his personality 
through the medium of his imagination. He has certain 
fixed ideas, certain permanent moods of mind, certain 
notions as to what ought to be and what ought not to 
be ; and these ideas, moods, or notions, he works forth 
into all that he fancies. He preaches while he sings ; 
what he imagines is a revelation of what he wishes. 
He does not live in a house of stone (to use a figure 
which, I think, is Mr. Browning's), communicating only 
by certain chinks and embrasures with the world 
without, and in which the possessor, while commanding 
a prospect all round, may keep himself and his own 
movements concealed. He lives in a house of glass, 
expressing his feelings as to what he sees' in gestures 
visible to all about him, and employing the poetic art 
only as a means of flashing his own image and its 
successive gesticulations to a greater and greater dis- 
tance. Here too the means of the poetic art correspond 
with the intention. The " subjective " poet, the poet 
of fixed ideas — dealing, as it is his tendency to do, 
not with things as they are in their infinite real 
complexity, but with the supposed principles of things, 
the springs or seeds of being, — such a poet may frame 
his pictures out of the stuff of real life, if he chooses, 
just as the v objective " poet does ; but even then, 
owing to the invariable meaning which he infuses into 

K 



130 SHELLEY. 



them, they will be in one strain, and more or less 
repetitions of each other. In Byron's poetry, for 
example, under very various forms, we have still a 
reproduction of the Byronic type of character. On 
the whole, however, it will be the tendency of the 
" subjective " poet of the most determined type not to 
take his scenery and circumstance from the real or 
historical world at all — not to hamper himself with the 
actual relations of time, place, and historical probability 
— but, as he concerns himself morally with Man in 
his primal elements, so to deal also with material 
nature as simplified into its masses and generalizations. 
In other words, he will lay his scene anywhere in 
vague time or space ; he will make his persons gigantic, 
mythical, and featureless, and will unfetter the mode 
of their actions from the ordinary terrestrial laws ; 
arid the objects amid which they move he will depict 
as visual allegories. Hence that well-known deficiency 
of human interest which often prevents poetry of this 
kind from being widely popular. Most men like to 
have their footing on a solid flooring of fact and 
history, and do not take nearly so much pleasure in 
a world of a few elemental ingredients and relations, 
fashioned to illustrate the action of a few supposed 
springs of being, as they do in representations of the 
living and moving complexity of our own wrinkled 
planet. 



SHELLEY. 131 



The distinction we have been expounding is, of 
course, not absolute. It would be difficult to name a 
poet belonging so purely to one of the orders as to 
have nothing in him of the other. On the whole, 
however, Shelley is eminently a " subjective " poet. 
In his Cenci, his Julian and Maddalo, and one or two 
other poems, he does make it his aim to represent 
historical occurrences, and scenes and feelings as they 
are found in actual life. But, in the main, he is a 
poet of fixed ideas — a poet dealing incessantly with 
the seeds and springs of being, and illustrating his 
notions of these in imaginations of an arbitrary and 
mythological character. His Poetry is, in fact, a kind 
of air-hung Mythology, shadowing forth the essential 
principles of a creed which might be called Shelleyism. 
What this creed was we have already partly seen in 
our sketch of his life ; but a word or two more may 
be added. 

At one time Shelley had, as he tells us himself, 
been a Materialist in philosophy. That is to say, he 
regarded the universe as consisting of an original basis 
or consolidation of matter of the kind called Inorganic,' 
upon which there had been reared, or out of which 
there had somehow grown, a quantity of other and 
more highly developed matter of the kind called 
Organic, ascending in a hierarchy of forms, with Man 

K 2 



132 SRELIEY. 

at the apex. According to this philosophy, in thinking 
of the universe, one is bound to think of matter and 
of nothing else — matter lying dead and obdurate, or 
matter pervaded by electricities, nerve-forces, and what 
not, so as to be locomotive, sensitive, active, and reflec- 
tive. But this philosophy Shelley had soon and very 
decidedly abandoned ; and, instead of it, he had taken 
up what is called the system of Idealism. According 
to this philosophy — which he had got at through 
Hume and Berkeley, and partly through Plato, — not 
Matter, but Thought, is the fundamental reality of the 
universe. Everything is thought; nothing exists but 
in and through thought. What we call external 
objects, what we call matter itself, is but thought of 
a certain quantity and variety, distinguished from 
thought recognised as such by certain accidents of 
force, frequency, and the like. Thoughts in certain 
successions, and in certain degrees of intensity : that 
is all we know anything of. The universe is but 
a certain coagulation or huge bubble-mountain of 
thoughts — the harder and more coagulated parts of the 
mass, crushed by the gravity of the others, constituting 
what we call matter, and forming a permanent basis , 
for all ; and the rest ascending in successive stages 
of tenuity till they end in the ether of once-imagined 
whimsies. But, this being the case, it follows that 
the universe may be continually added to and disturbed 



SHELLEY. 133 



in its fabric. Thoughts being things, and the mind 
having the power of pouring forth a constant succession 
of new thoughts, these really rush into the fabric of 
the past accumulation, and, in adjusting themselves 
and finding their places, disturb its porosity, and keep 
it continually agitated. Above all, the poet, whose 
very business it is to send forth new imaginations of 
a great and impressive character, is thus always 
agitating, disturbing, and remodelling creation. This 
is a doctrine which Shelley is perpetually repeating 
in Ins prose-writings. " Imagination," he says, " or 
mind employed prophetically in imaging forth its 
objects, is the faculty of human nature on which every 
gradation of its progress — nay, every, the minutest, 
change — depends." According to Shelley, all the 
thoughts of all minds are adding to and altering the 
universe ; but it is the business of the poet, by certain 
splendid precalculated imaginations, either softly to 
disintegrate the mass of previously accumulated ex- 
istence, so that it shall fall into new arrangements, 
or sometimes to convulse, crack, and rend this mass 
by the blast of a wholesome explosion through what 
was previously a chaos. The Poet would thus be 
pre-eminently the Eeformer. 

So far we have but the theoretical side of Shelley's 
system. The difficulty is to see how, when he had 
risen theoretically to the extreme of his Idealism, he 



134 SHELLEY. 



turned in mid- air, and came back on the world in a 
scheme of practical reason. Admit the universe to 
be a coagulation of old thoughts, modifiable by new 
ones, what hinds of new thoughts will make the right 
and desirable modification ? What is the principle, 
what the rule, what the right and wrong, in thought % 
The poet, as the reformer-in-chief for the human race, 
has to employ himself in splendid pre-calculated 
imaginations, which, rushing forth from him, shall 
softly arrange things in new harmonies, or violently 
split their way with revolutionary force ! Well, 
wherein consists the splendour to be desired in these 
imaginations, and on what principles are they to be 
precalculated ? Here, as is often the case with philo- 
sophers, there is a gap in which we cannot see the 
links connecting Shelley's theoretical or ascending with 
his practical or descending reason. But he lias a 
practical system, and a very definite one. Unlike 
Hume, he ascends to the extreme of Idealism, not to 
end in indifference or scepticism, but to descend again 
all the more vehemently upon the world of man and 
life, armed with a faith. He speaks, indeed, of Deity, 
and other such ideas, as being only "the modes in 
which thoughts are combined ; " but it is evident, what- 
ever he calls them, that it is only the presence or the 
absence of certain ideas of this class that constitutes, 
in his view, the difference between the right and the 



SHELLEY. 135 



wroDg, between the splendid and the mean, in thought. 
Thoughts combined so are eternally noble and good ; 
thoughts combined otherwise are eternally ignoble and 
bad — no man ever cherished a belief of this kind more 
passionately than Shelley. No man, therefore, had 
more of the essence of an absolute ethical faith, of a 
faith not fabricated out of experience, but structurally 
derived from an authority in the invisible. Theoretically 
an idealist, he was morally a fanatic. "I have con- 
fidence in my moral sense alone, for that is a kind 
of originality," is one of his own significant sayings. 
His whole life is an illustration. His brief existence 
in the world was one continued shriek about love 
and justice. He had " a passion/' he says, " for re- 
forming the world." Nor was it a superficial reform 
that he contemplated. From first to last, as he 
thought, human society had been an aggregate of 
wrong and corruption. Kings, priests, and govern- 
ments had filled the earth with misery. Bound by 
sophisms and slavish fears, men and women were living 
defrauded of their natural rights, and out of their 
natural relations. 

" Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower 
Even in its tender bud ; their influence darts, 
Like subtle poison, through the bloodless veins 
Of desolate society." 

But this state of things is not to last for ever ! There 



138 SHELLEY. 



will one day be a reign of truth and love, of justice 
and social equality ! 

" Spirit of Nature ! thou 
Life of interminable multitudes, 
Soul of those mighty spheres 
Whose changeless paths through Heaven's deep 
silence lie, 
Soul of that smallest being 

The dwelling of whose life 
Is one faint April sun-gleam — 
Man, like these passive things, 
Thy will unconsciously fulnlleth : 
Like theirs, his age of endless peace, 
Which Time is fast maturing, 
Will swiftly, surely, come ; 
And the unbounded frame which thou pervadest 
Will be without a flaw 
Marring its perfect symmetry." 

This is Shelley's fixed faith, the burthen of all his 
poetry. It was his own aim as a poet to send forth 
sounds that might shake the reign of "Anarch Custom," 
and hasten the blessed era in whose coming he believed. 
Nor was it only on the great scale that he desired 
to be a prophet of love and justice. He was to carry 
out his principle to its minutest applications, promoting 
every movement for the mitigation of social or indi- 
vidual suffering, and so constituting himself, as well 
in literature as in action, what nature, in framing him 
so delicately, had fitted him to be — 



SHELLEY. 137 



" A nerve o'er which might creep 
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth." 

Here we recur to a question already opened. What- 
ever Shelley's formal affirmations respecting the doc- 
trines of Deity and Immortality might be, it is clear 
that the fanatical intensity of his ethical creed implied 
a habit of viewing the world from a point out of 
itself, and by the rule of ideas not belonging to it. 
Had his principle been " to apprehend no farther than 
this world," why such spasm, why such wailing, such 
rage against universal wrong, such frantic longing to re- 
fashion human nature from its very roots ? On such a 
principle, it is true, a man might be so far a reformer. 
He might seek to correct the earth by itself, the part by 
the knowledge of the whole, social evils in Asia by the 
experience of Europe. But for a man to start up and 
proclaim the whole past movement of humanity to have 
been wrong, and to propose to arrest it, and shift its 
very wheels, is a different matter. This was Shelley's 
proposition. He did not propose only that the world 
should be corrected by itself, the part by the whole, but 
that it should be corrected by a rule eternal and im- 
mutable, which he sometimes called love or justice, and 
sometimes the spirit of universal nature. There was a 
Heart beating somewhere, to whose pulsations the earth 
as a whole was rebel, but which would yet subdue the 
earth to unison with it ; and, meanwhile, the agents of 



138 SHELLEY. 

good and the harbingers of the final harmony were to 
be those imaginations of man which, by relating them- 
selves to this Heart, were to be prematurely in unison 
with it, and at war with the earth and its customs. 
Nothing short of this belief, however he phrased it, 
was the principle of Shelley's practical philosophy. 
Seeing that it was so, might not we say that, like his 
own Prometheus, he had tipped his reed with stolen 
fire? 

Argument and metaphysics apart, there is, at least, 
no way in which the fancy may more easily apprehend 
the peculiarity of Shelley's genius than by thinking of 
him as one who surveyed the world not from a point 
within it or on it, but from a point in distant space. 
Better still, perhaps, one might think of him as not a 
native of the earth at all, but some fluttering spirit of 
a lighter sphere, that had dropped on the earth by 
chance, unable to be in happy relation to it as a whole, 
though keenly sensitive to some of its beauties. Were 
our science of pedigree worth anything, it might save 
us the necessity of any such figure. Eemembering 
that the year of Shelley's birth was that of the utmost 
agony of the French Eevolution, when convulsion was 
shaking all things established, and new social principles 
were everywhere abroad, we might then have a glim- 
mering how it happened that the genius of the time 
took a whim to appear even in Sussex, and bespeak as 



SHELLEY. 139 



one of its incarnations the child of a commonplace 
English baronet, who had never bargained for such an 
honour. But, unable to make anything to the purpose 
of such a scientific fancy, we may resort to the other. 
Shelley's personal friends used to resort to it. " I used 
to tell him," says Leigh Hunt, " that he had come from 
the planet Mercury." One may vary the form of the 
fancy ; and, though the pale planet Mercury, the 
sickly darling of the sun, seems such an orb as Shelley 
might have come from, had he come from any, it might 
be fitter to fancy that he had come from none, but, till 
till he touched our earth, had been winging about in 
unsubstantial ether. When Milton's rebel host left the 
celestial realms, angels flocking on angels and the great 
Archangel leading, might we not suppose that some small 
seraph, who had joined the rebellion, lagged behind the 
rest in his flight, became detached from them by regret 
or weakness, and, unable to overtake them, was left to 
flutter disconsolate and alone amid the starry spaces ? 
Excluded from Heaven, but not borne down with the 
rest into Pandemonium, if this creature did at last 
come near our orb in his wanderings, might it not 
become his refuge; and then might we not suppose 
that, though retaining the principle of rebellion — so 
that, when the Highest was named, he would shriek 
against the name — yet his recollections of his original 
would be purer, and his nature less impaired, than if, 



140 SHELLEY. 

instead of transparent space, populous Pandemonium 
had "been his intermediate home ? 

Whatever form we give to the fancy, the character- 
istics of Shelley's poetry are such as to accord with it. 
Intense as is his ethical spirit, his desire to act upon 
man and society, his imagination cannot work with 
things as he finds them, with the actual stuff of 
historical life. His mode of thinking is not according 
to the terrestrial conditions of time, place, cause and 
effect, variety of race, climate, and costume. His 
persons are shapes, winged forms, modernized versions 
of Grecian mythology, or mortals highly allegorized; 
and their movements are vague, swift, and independent 
of ordinary physical laws. In the Revolt of Islam, 
for example, the story is that of two lovers who career 
through the plains and cities of an imaginary kingdom 
on a Tartar horse, or skim over leagues of ocean in a 
boat whose prow is of moonstone. But for the Cenci, 
and one or two other pieces, one would say that 
Shelley had scarcely any aptitude for the historical. 
Even in his sensuous imagery the same arbitrariness 
is apparent. His landscapes, like his persons, are a 
sort of allegories. His true poetical element, where 
alone he takes things as he finds them, is the atmo- 
sphere. Shelley is preeminently the poet of what 
may be called meteorological circumstance. He is at 
home among winds, mists, rains, snows, clouds gorgeous- 



SHELLEY. 141 



ly coloured, glories of sunrise, nights of moonshine, 
lightnings, streamers, and falling stars; and what of 
vegetation and geology he brings in is but as so much 
that might be seen by an aerial creature in its ascents 
and descents. His poetry is full of direct and all but 
conscious suggestions of this. Need we cite, as one, 
his Ode to the Skylark, that "scorner of the ground," 
whose skill he covets for the poet ? Then there is his 
lyric of The Cloud : — 

" I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, 

For the seas and the streams ; 
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid 

In their noon-day dreams ; 
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken 

The sweet birds every one, 
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast 

As she dances about the sun ; 
I wield the flail of the lashing hail, 

And whiten the green plains under, 
And then again I dissolve in rain, 

And laugh as I pass in thunder." 

Again in his Invocation to the West Wind, in which, 
expressly imploring it to be his spirit, he dedicates 
himself, as it were, to the meteorological for ever : — 

" wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 
* * * * . * # 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is ! 



142 SHELLEY. 



What if my leaves are falling like its own? 
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, 
My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, 
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth ; 
And, by the incantation of this verse, 

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 
Be through my lips to unawakened earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy ! O wind, 

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ? 



IV. 
THE LIFE AND POETRY OE KEATS. 



IV. 

THE LIFE AND POETRY OF KEATS. 1 

Keats was born in Moorfields, London, in October 
1795, the son of a livery-stable keeper of some 
wealth, who had attained that position by marrying 
his master's daughter and so succeeding him in the 
business. There were five children, four sons and a 
daughter, of whom John was the third. The father, 
who is described as an active, energetic little man of 
much natural talent, was killed by a fall from a horse 
at the age of thirty-six, when Keats was in his ninth 
year ; and the care of the children devolved upon the 
mother, a tall, large-featured woman, of considerable 
force of character. There was also a maternal uncle, 
a very tall, strong, and courageous man, who had been 
in the navy, had served under Duncan at Camper- 
down, and had done extraordinary feats in the way 
of righting. Partly in emulation of this uncle, partly 

1 Macmillarfs Magazine, November 1860. 

L 



146 KEATS. 



from constitutional inclination, the boys were always 
fighting too — in the house, about the stables, or out 
in the adjacent streets, with each other, or with any- 
body else. John, though the shortest for his years, 
and the most like his father, was the most pugnacious 
of the lot; but with his pugnacity he combined, it is 
said, a remarkable sensibility, and a great love of fun. 
This character he took with him to a boarding-school 
at Enfield, near London, kept by the father of Mr. 
Charles Cowden Clarke, then also a boy, not much 
older than Keats, receiving his education under his 
father's roof. At school, Keats, according to the 
recollections of Mr. Clarke and others of his school- 
fellows, was at first a perfect little terrier for resolute^- 
ness and pugnacity, but very placable and frolicsome, 
very much liked, and, though not particularly studious, 
very quick at learning. There would seem to have 
been more of pleasant sociability between the family 
of the master and the scholars in the school at Enfield, 
and more of literary talk at bye-hours, than were then 
common at private English schools. At all events, 
when, by the death of his mother, of lingering con- 
sumption, in 1810, the guardianship of Keats, his two 
surviving brothers, and his only sister, devolved on a 
Mr. Abbey, a London merchant who had known the 
family, and when Mr. Abbey thought it best to take 
two of the boys from school and apprentice them to 



KEATS. 147 



professions, it was felt by Keats to be a very happy 
arrangement that he was apprenticed to a surgeon- 
apothecary at Edmonton, so near to Enfield that he 
could still go over when he liked to see the Clarkes. 
He was then fifteen years of age. His share of the 
family property, held for him by his guardian till he 
came of age, w r as about 2,000/. ; and his apprenticeship 
was to last five years. 

From Edmonton Keats was continually walking over 
to Enfield to see his young friend, Cowden Clarke, 
and to borrow books. It was some time in 1812 that 
he borrowed Spenser's Faery Queene. The effect was 
immediate and extraordinary. " He ramped/' says 
Mr. Clarke, "through the scenes of the romance;" 
he would talk of nothing but Spenser; he had whole 
passages by heart, which he would repeat; and he 
would dwell wdth an ecstasy of delight on fine par- 
ticular phrases, such as " the sea-shouldering whale.'* 
His first known poetical composition (he was then 
seventeen) was a piece expressly entitled " In Imi- 
tation of Spenser." 

" Now Morning from her orient chamber came, 
And her first footsteps touch'd a verdant hill, 
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame, 
Silvering the untainted gushes of its rill ; 
Which, pure from mossy beds," &c. 

From that moment it seemed as if Keats lived only 

L 2 



148 KB ATS. 



to read poetry and to write it. From Spenser he 
went to Chaucer, from Chaucer to Milton, and so on 
and on, with ever-widening range, through all our 
sweeter and greater poets. He luxuriated in them by 
himself; he talked about them, and read parts of 
them aloud to his friends ; he became a critic of their 
thoughts, their words, their rhymes, their cadences. 
His chief partner in these tastes was Mr. Cowden 
Clarke, with whom he would take walks, or sit up 
whole evenings, discoursing of poets and poetry; and 
he acknowledges, in one of his metrical epistles, the 
influence which Mr. Clarke had in forming his literary 
likings. Above all, it was Mr. Clarke that first intro- 
duced him to any knowledge of ancient Greek poetry. 
This was effected by lending him Chapman's Homer, 
his first acquaintance with which, and its effects on 
him, are celebrated in one of the finest and best- 
known of his sonnets. Thenceforward Greek poetry, 
so far as it was accessible to him in translation, had 
peculiar fascinations for him. By similar means he 
became fondly familiar with some of the softer Italian 
poets, and with the stories of Boccaccio. It was 
noted by one of his friends that his preferences at 
this time, whether in English or in other poetry, were 
still for passages of sweet, sensuous description, or of 
sensuous-ideal beauty, such as are to be found in the 
minor poems of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, and 



KEATS. 149 



in Spenser throughout, and that he rarely seemed to 
dwell with the same enthusiasm on passages of fervid 
feeling, of severe reference to life, or of powerful 
human interest. At this time, in fact, his feeling for 
poetry was very much that of an artist in language, 
observing effects which particularly delighted him, and 
studying them with a professional admiration of the 
exquisite. 'He brooded over fine phrases like a lover; 
and often, when he met a quaint or delicious word 
in the course of his reading, he would take pains to 
make it his own by using it, as speedily as possible, 
in some poem he was writing. Ah ! those days of 
genial, enjoying youth, when, over the fire, witli a 
book in one's hand, one got fine passages by heart, 
and, in walks with one or two choice companions, 
there was an opening of the common stock, and hours 
and miles were whiled away with tit-bits of recent 
readirjg from a round of favourite poets ! Those were 
the days when books were books ; and it is a fact to 
be remembered, as regards literature, that one half of 
the human race is always under the age of twenty-one. 
Before Keats's apprenticeship was over, it was pretty 
clear to himself and his friends that he would not 
persevere in becoming a surgeon. In the year 181G, 
when he came from Edmonton to London, at the age 
of twenty, he did indeed enter himself as a student 
at the hospitals ; but he very soon gave up attending 



150 KEATS. 

thein, and found more agreeable employment in the 
society of Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Godwin, Dilke, Oilier, 
the painter Haydon, Hazlitt, Charles Armitage Brown, 
and others whose names are less remembered. In this 
society of artists and men of letters — forming, so far 
as the literary ingredient was concerned, the so-called 
" Cockney School," as distinct from the " Lakists " of 
the North of England, and from the Edinburgh men 
who gave both of them their names — Keats at once 
took a prominent place, less on account of what he 
had actually done than on the promise of what he 
was to be. On first settling in London, he had taken 
lodgings in the Poultry, in the heart of the City; but, 
as soon as he had abandoned the idea of following 
the medical profession, he removed to Hampstead, a 
suburb of London as you approach it from the north. 

London, with all the evils resulting from its vast- 
ness, has suburbs as rich and beautiful, after the 
English style of scenery, as any in the world ; and 
even now, despite the encroachments of the ever- 
encroaching brick and mortar on the surrounding 
country, the neighbourhood of Hampstead and High- 
gate, near London, is one in which the lover of 
natural beauty and the solitary might well delight. 
The ground is much the highest round London; there 
are real heights and hollows, so that the omnibuses 



KEATS. 151 



coming from town have to put on additional horses ; 
you ascend steep roads, lying in part through villages 
of quaint shops, and old, high-gabled brick houses,, 
still distinct from the great city, though about to be 
devoured by it — in part through straggling lines of 
villas, with gardens and grassy parks round them, 
and here and there an old inn ; and, from the highest 
eminences, when the view is clear, you can see London 
left behind, a mass of purplish mist, with domes and 
steeples visible through it. Where the villages end, 
you are really in the country. There is the Heath, 
on the Hampstead side — an extensive tract of knolls 
and little glens, covered here and there with furze, 
all abloom with yellow in the summer, when the 
larks may be heard singing over it ; threaded here 
and there by paths with seats in them, or broken by 
clumps of trees, and blue rusty-nailed palings, which 
enclose old-fashioned family-houses and shrubberies, 
where the coachman in livery may be seen talking 
lazily to the gardener; but containing also seques- 
tered spots where one might wander alone for hours, 
or lie concealed amid the sheltering furze. At night, 
Hampstead Heath would be as ghastly a place to 
wander in as an uneasy spirit could desire. In every 
hollow, seen in the starlight, one could fancy that 
there had been a murder ; nay, tradition points to 
spots where foul crimes have been committed, or 



152 KEATS. 

where, in the dead of night, forgers, who had walked, 
with discovery on their track, along dark intervening 
roads, from the hell of lamp-lit London, had lain 
down and poisoned themselves. In the day, however, 
and especially on a bright summer day, the scene is 
open, healthy, and cheerful. On the one side, is a 
view across a green valley, called " The Vale of 
Health," to the opposite heights of Highgate; on the 
other, the eye traverses a flat expanse of fields and 
meadows, stretching for many miles northward, and 
looking, in its rich level variety, like a miniature 
representation of all England. And then the lanes 
all about and around, leading away from the Heath, 
deep and steep, between high banks and along the 
old church and churchyard, and past little ponds and 
gardens, and often ending in footpaths through fields, 
where one has to get over stiles ! 

All this of Hampstead and its vicinity even now 
[I860]; but, forty years ago, it was still better. At 
that time London itself was a different city. There 
was less smoke ; there were no steamers on the river ; 
and from the overspanning bridges the water could be 
seen running clear beneath, with the consciousness of 
fish in it. Then, too, the conveyance between London 
and such suburbs as Hampstead and Highgate was 
not by omnibuses passing every five minutes, but by 
the old stage-coaches, with their guards and horns, 



KEATS. 153 



coming and going leisurely twice or thrice a day. In 
those days, therefore, Hampstead and Highgate were 
still capable of having an individuality of their own, 
and of having associations fixed upon them by the 
occupations of their residents, even though these were 
in London daily, and were, by their general designa- 
tion, properly enough, Londoners. Part of their cele- 
brity now, indeed, arises from associations thus formed. 
Old Leigh Hunt, visiting those scenes not long before 
his death, would point out the exact wooden seat on 
the Heath where he and Keats, or where he and 
Shelley, sat when such and such a poem w r as recited, 
or the exact spot in a path through the fields where 
Coleridge took leave of him and Charles Lamb, to 
dawdle back to his home at Highgate, and where 
Lamb, while the departing skirts of the sage were 
visible, stuttered out some pun about his personal 
appearance and his last metaphysical monologue. At 
the particular time of which we are now speaking 
Leigh Hunt was living at Hampstead, where also 
lived Mr. Armitage Brown, a retired merchant of 
literary tastes, and others of whom it is not neces- 
sary to take note; and there, in the evenings, at the 
houses of such men, artists and others would drop 
in ; and then, ye future critics of Blackivood and 
the Quarterly, what wit there would be, what music, 
what portfolios of sketches and engravings, what white 



154 KEATS. 



casts from the antique, what talk about poetry and 
literature ! From that time, with scarcely an excep- 
tion, Hampstead was the London home of Keats — 
first as a guest of Leigh Hunt, or a lodger near to 
him; and afterwards, and more permanently, as a 
guest of Mr. Armitage Brown. Indeed, just as 
Wordsworth and his associates were supposed to have 
constituted themselves into a school by retiring to 
Cumberland and Westmoreland, in order to be in 
closer relations to nature, as exhibited in that dis- 
trict of lake and mountain, so it might have been 
suggested maliciously of Keats, Hunt, and the rest of 
their set, that the difference between them and the 
elder school was that what they called Nature was 
Nature as seen from Hampstead Heath. As the one 
set of poets had received from their Edinburgh critics 
the name of "the Lakists," so, to make the joke 
correspond, the others, instead of being called " the 
Cockney Poets," might have been named the Hamp- 
stead Heath-ens. 

Keats signalized his accession to this peculiar 
literary group by publishing, in 1817, a little volume 
of poems, containing some of his sonnets and other 
pieces now appended to his longer and later com- 
positions. The volume scarcely touched the attention 
of the public, though it served to show his power to 



KEATS. 155 

his immediate friends. He was then two-and- twenty- 
years of age; and his appearance was rather singular. 
Coleridge, who once shook hands with him, when he 
met him with Hunt in a lane near Highgate, describes 
him as " a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth." The 
descriptions, of Hunt and others are more particular. 
He was considerably under middle height, his lower 
limbs being small, in comparison with the upper, to 
a degree that marred his whole proportion. His 
shoulders were very broad for his size ; his face was 
strongly cut, yet delicately mobile, expressing an un- 
usual combination of determination with sensibility, 
its worst feature being the mouth, which had a pro- 
jecting upper lip, and altogether a savage pugilistic 
look. Nor did the look belie him. He had great 
personal courage, and once took the trouble to thrash 
a butcher for some insolent conduct in a regular 
stand-up fight. His hair was brown, and his eyes 
large, and of a dark, glowing blue. " His head," says 
Leigh Hunt, "was a puzzle for the phrenologists, 
" being remarkably small in the skull — a singularity 
" which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, 
" whose hats I could not get on." His voice, unlike 
Shelley's, was deep and grave. His entire expres- 
sion was that of eager power; and, in contradiction 
of what was observed of him at an earlier period, he 
was now easily, though still apparently against his 



156 KEATS. 

will, betrayed into signs of vehement emotion. " At 
the recital of a noble action, or a beautiful thought," 
says Mr. Hunt, " his eyes would suffuse with tears, 
and his mouth trembled." On hearing of some un- 
manly conduct, he once burst out, "Why is there 
not a human dust-hole into which to tumble such 
fellows ? " Evidently ill-health, as well as imagina- 
tive temperament, had to do with this inability to 
restrain tears and other signs of agitated feeling. His 
mother had died of consumption at a comparatively 
early age; his younger brother, Tom, was already far 
gone in the same fatal malady; and, though there 
was as yet no distinct symptom of consumption in 
Keats, he was often flushed and feverish, and had his 
secret fears. He had many hours of sprightliness, 
however, when those fears would vanish, and he would 
be full of frolic and life. In allusion to this occa- 
sional excess of fun and animal spirits, his friends 
punned upon his name, shortening it from " John 
Keats" into "Junkets." Still, amid all — in his times 
of despondency, as well as in his seasons of hope — 
Poetry was his ceaseless thought, and to be a Poet 
his one ambition : — 



" for ten years, that I may overwhelm* 
Myself in Poesy ! So I may do the deed 
That my own soul has to itself decreed !" 



KEATS. 157 

Of what kind this intended deed was we have also 
some indication. Like all the fresher young poets of 
his time, Keats had imbibed, partly from constitu- 
tional predisposition, partly from conscious reasoning, 
that theory of Poetry which, for more than twenty 
years, Wordsworth had been disseminating by precept 
and by example through the literary mind of Eng- 
land. This theory, in its historical aspect, I will 
venture to call Pre-Dryclenism. Its doctrine, histori- 
cally, was that the age of true English Poetry was 
the period anterior to Dryden — the period of Chaucer, 
Spenser, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Milton — and that, 
with a few exceptions, the subsequent period, from 
Dryden inclusively down to the time of Words- 
worth's own appearance as a poet, had been a prosaic 
interregnum, during which what passed for poetry was 
either an inflated style of diction which custom had 
rendered pleasing, or, at best, shrewd sense and wit, 
or miscellaneous cogitation, more or less weighty, put 
into metre. 

Take an example. Here are two stanzas from a 
well-known paraphrase of Scripture, still sung in 
churches over a large part of the kingdom. 

" In life's gay morn, when sprightly youth 
, With vital ardour glows, 
And shines in all the fairest charms 
Which beauty can disclose, 



158 KEATS. 

Deep on thy soul, before its power? 

Are yet by vice enslaved, 
Be thy Creator's glorious name 

And character engraved." 

How remorselessly Wordsworth would have torn this 
passage to pieces — as, indeed, he did a similar para- 
phrase of Scripture by Dr. Johnson ! " Life's gay 
morn!" " sprightly youth!" he would have said, — 
meaningless expressions, used because it is considered 
poetical to stick an adjective before every noun, and 
"gay" and "sprightly" are adjectives conveniently in 
stock ! Then, " sprightly youth with vital ardour 
glows" — what is this but slip-shod; and, besides, why 
tug the verb to the end of the phrase and say "with 
vital ardour glows," instead of "glows with vital 
ardour," as you would do in natural speech? O, 
of course, the rhyme I Yes ; but who asked you 
to rhyme at all, in the first place ? and, in the 
next place, if you were bent on rhyming, and found 
" ardour " would not suit at the end of your pre- 
cious line, that was your difficulty, not mine ! What 
are you a poet for but to overcome such difficul- 
ties, or what right have you to extract the rhythms 
and rhymes that you want in your craft as a ver- 
sifier from the mere torture of honest prose? And 
then, worse and worse, "Youth," already "glowing," 
with this "vital ardour," also, it seems, "shines/' 



KEATS. 159 

and (marvellous metaphor !) shines " with charms " — 
which " charms " (metaphor still more helpless !) are 
" the fairest charms disclosed by beauty ! " And so 
on he would have gone, pointing out the flaws of 
meaning and of expression in the next stanza in the 
same stern manner. Pass, he would have said at last, 
from this poor jingle of words to the simple and 
beautiful text of which it is offered as a paraphrase : 
" Eemember now thy Creator in the days of thy 
youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years 
draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure 
in them." The defects, he would have continued, seen 
on a small scale in the foregoing metrical version of 
this passage, were visible throughout the whole course 
of English poetry after Milton — with here and there, 
as in Thomson and Dyer, a remarkable exception. 
There was then no faithfulness to fact in description 
or in imagery from nature, no natural speech in verse, 
nothing save more or less of intellectual vigour ex- 
hibited through an artificial form of diction, to which 
men had grown so accustomed that they had ceased 
to inspect it logically. Even men of real genius., 
such as Dryden himself and Pope, were, in the bulk 
of their writings, but splendid practitioners of a false 
style, which, when pecple had been educated to see 
its viciousness, would mar their fame as poets. 

I am not here discussing Wordsworth's theory; I 



130 KEATS. 



am only stating it. Keats, I repeat, had adopted this 
theory, if not in all its particulars, at least in its 
essence. Thus, in one of his pieces, after speaking of 
the greatness of his old favourite English poets, he 

says — 

" Could all this be forgotten ? Yes, a schism 
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism 
Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
Men were thought wise who could not understand 
His glories : with a puling infant's force 
They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse 
And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd ! 
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd 
Its gathering waves ; — ye felt it not. The blue 
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew 
Of summer-night collected still to make 
The morning precious ; Beauty was awake ! 
Why were ye not awake ? But ye were dead 
To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed 
To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule 
And compass vile ; so 'that ye taught a school 
Of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and clip and fit, 
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit. 
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task : 
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask 
Of poesy. Ill-fated, impious race ! 
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, 
And did not know it ! No, they went about, 
Holding a poor decrepit standard out, 
Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, 
The name of one Boileau ! " 



KEATS. 161 

Keats, then, was a Pre-Drydenist in his notions of 
poetry, and in his own intentions as a poetic artist. 
But I will say more. Wordsworth had then so far 
■* conquered the opposition through which he had been 
,_ struggling that a modified Pre-Drydenisrn was univer- 
sally diffused through English literary society, and 
the so-called Cockney, or Hampstead-Heath School, 
with whom accident had associated Keats, were largely 
tinged with it. They did not, indeed, go all the 
length .with Wordsworth in depreciating Dryden and 
Pope (as who could?); but a superior relish for the 
older poets was one of their avowed characteristics. 
But in this, I believe, Keats went beyond the rest of 
them. It may be perceived, I think, that, with all 
his esteem for Hunt and Shelley, both as kind per- 
sonal friends and as poets, he had notions respecting 
himself which led him, even while in their society 
and accounted one of them, to fix his gaze with 
steadier reverence than they did on the distant veteran 
of Eydal Mount. To Wordsworth alone does he seem 
to have looked as, all in all, a sublimity among con- 
temporary poets. 

So far, however, as Keats had yet been publicly 
heard of, it was only as one fledgling more in the 
brood of poets whose verses were praised in the 
Examiner. The things he had yet published were but 
little studies in language and versification, preparatory 

M 



162 KEATS. 

to something that could be called a poem. Such a 
poem he now resolved to write. Always drawn by 
a kind of mental affinity to the sensuous Mythology 
of the Greeks, he had chosen for his subject the 
legend of Endymion, the youthful lover of the moon- 
goddess Artemis. "A long poem/' he said, "is the 
test of invention ; and it will be a test of mv inven- 
tion if T can make 4,000 lines out of this one bare 
circumstance, and fill them with poetry." To accom- 
plish his task, he left London in the spring of 1817, 
and took up his abode first in the Isle of Wight, then 
at Margate (in both of which places he revelled in 
the views of the sea as a newly-found pleasure), and 
then, successively, at Canterbury, Oxford, and other 
places inland. In the winter of 1817-18 he returned 
to Hampstead with the four books of his Endymion 
completed. The absence of seven or eight months, 
during which this poem was written, was also 
the period in which many of those letters to his 
friends were written that have been edited by Mr. 
Monckton Milnes, in his Memoir of the poet. These 
letters have hardly received the attention they deserve. 
They are very remarkable letters. One can see, indeed, 
that they are the letters of an intellectual invalid, of 
a poor youth too conscious of " the endeavour of this 
present breath," watching incessantly his own morbid 
symptoms, and communicating them to his friends. 



KEATS. i«3 



There is also in them a somewhat unnatural straining 
after quaint and facetious conceits, as if he would not 
write common-place, but would force himself by the 
mere brief rumination of the moment into some 
minute originality or whim of fancy. On the whole, 
however, with the proper allowance, the letters may 
be read without any injury to the highest notion of 
him that may be formed from his compositions that 
were meant for publication ; and there have not been 
many young poets of whose casual letters as much 
could be said. They abound in shrewd observations, 
in delicate and subtle criticisms, in fine touches of 
description, and in thoughts of a philosophical kind 
that are at once comprehensive and deep. 

" Enclymion : A Poetic Romance " appeared in the 
beginning of 1818. Its reception was not wholly satis- 
factory. It made Keats's name more widely known; 
it procured him visits and invitations ; and, when he 
attended Hazlitt's lectures, ladies to whom he was 
pointed out looked at him instead of listening to the 
lecturer. But Hunt, Shelley, and the rest, though they 
admired the poem, and thought some passages in it very J 
wonderful, had many faults to find. The language in 
many parts was juvenile, not to say untasteful; such 
phrases as " honey-feel of bliss " were too frequent ; it 
was impossible for any understanding of a rational sort 

M 2 



164 KEATS. 



to reconcile itself to such a bewildering plenitude of 
luxuriant invention raised on such a mere nothing of a 
basis ; and, on the whole, there was too evident a way- 
wardness in the sequence of the thoughts, arising from 
a passive dependence of the matter at every point on the 
mere suggestion of the rhyme ! These and other such 
objections were heard on all hands. Worst of all, 
Wordsworth had no approbation to give. At Haydon's, 
one evening, when Wordsworth was present, Keats was 
induced to repeat to him the famous Hymn to Pan, which 
Shelley had praised as that in the whole poem which 
"gave the surest sign of ultimate excellence." The iron- 
grey poet heard it to the end, and then only remarked 
that it was " a pretty piece of paganism." And so, with 
no more encouragement than usually falls to the lot of 
a young man in such cases, Keats had to keep his own 
counsel, and look forward to other works, in which, 
choosing more solid subjects, he should exert his powers 
more compactly and impressively, and win, by better- 
disciplined strokes, the recognition which the world 
yields so slowly to forms of genius differing from those 
to which it has been accustomed. His was certainly a 
new faculty, which had to create and educate the taste 
by which it should itself be appreciated ; and his hope, 
therefore, lay with the body of the growing youth of 
the land, whose perpetual privilege it is that they alone ■ 
can receive and enjoy without criticising. No man 



KEATS. 165 



was ever fully and heartily accepted, among his own 
sex, except by those younger than himself. 

Keats, there is no doubt, was prepared to wait and 
work on. The story of his having been killed by the 
savage article in the Quarterly is proved to have been 
wholly untrue. He had sense enough and courage 
enough to get over that chagrin within the usual period 
of twenty-four hours, which, if there is any use for 
human spirits in the earth's rotation, ought to bring 
them as well as other things round again to the status 
quo. But other causes were a-t work, some of which are 
but dimly revealed by his biographer, but the chief of 
which was his hereditary malady of consumption. In 
the winter of 1819-20 he was seized with the fatal blood- 
spitting he had long dreaded; after a few months of 
lingering, during which he seemed partly to fight with 
Death as one to whom life was precious, partly to long 
to die as one who had nothing to live for, he was 
removed to Italy ; and there, having suffered much, he 
breathed his last at Eome on the 23d of February, 1821, 
at the age of twenty-five years and four months. He 
had wished for " ten years " of poetic life, but not half 
that term had been allowed him. The sole literary 
event of his life, after the publication of his Endymion 
in 1818, had been the publication of his Lamia, The Eve 
of St. Agnes, anal Other Poems, in 1820 ; and the sole 
variation of his manner of life had consisted in his 



166 KEATS. 



leaving Hampstead for a ramble or a residence in the 
country., and returning again from the country to 
Hampstead or London. 

After all, whether a man is a poet, a philosopher, or a 
man of action, there is a common standard by which he 
may be tried, so as to measure his relative intellectual 
importance. The determination of this standard is 
difficult ; but ultimately, I believe, the truest measure 
of every man, in intellectual respects, is the measure 
of his speculative or purely philosophical faculty. So 
far as this may be demurred to, the objection will arise, 
I fancy, from the practical difficulty of applying the test. 
It is only certain poets that give us the opportunity 
of judging of the strength of their rational or purely 
noetic organ — that faculty by which men speculate, or 
frame what are called "thoughts" or "propositions." 
Whenever this is done, however, then, cwteris paribus, 
the deeper thinker is the greater poet. Hence it is 
an excellent thing for the critic to catch his poet 
writing prose. He has him then at his mercy ; he can 
keep him in the trap, and study him through the 
bars at his leisure. If he is a poor creature, he will 
be found out; if he has genuine vigour, then, with 
all allowance for any ungainliness arising from his 
being out of his proper element, there will be evi- 
dences of it. Now, tried by any test of this kind, 



KEATS. 167 

Keats will be found to have been no weakling. The 
following passages from his prose letters, for example, 
are, I believe, thoughts of pith and substance, whether 
absolutely true or not: — 

" Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal 
chemicals operating on the mass of neutral intellect, 
but they have not any individuality, any determined 
character. I would call the top and head of those 
who have a proper self Men of Power." 

" Men should bear with each other ; there is not the 
man who may not be cut up, ay, lashed to pieces, on 
his weakest side. The best of men have but a portion 
of good in them — a kind of spiritual yeast in their 
frames which creates the ferment of existence — by 
which a man is propelled to act and strive and buffet 
with circumstance. The sure way is, first to know a 
man's faults, and then be passive. If, after that, he 
insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no 
power to break the link." 

" I had, not a dispute, but a disquisition, with Dilke 
upon various subjects. Several things dovetailed in 
my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went 
to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, 
and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I 
mean negative capability ; that is, when a man is cap- 
able of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, 
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, 
. . . This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps 
take us no farther than this — that, with a great poet, 
the sense of beauty overcomes every other considera- 
tion, or rather obliterates every other consideration." 



168 KEATS. 



"An extensive knowledge is necessary to thinking 
people : it takes away the heat and fever, and helps, 
by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the 
mystery." 

" Axioms in philosophy are not axioms till they have 
been proved upon our pulses." 

" I compare human life to a large mansion of many 
apartments; two of which only I can describe — the 
doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. The 
first we step into we call the Infant or Thoughtless 
Chamber; in which we remain as long as we do not 
think. We remain there a long while, and, notwith- 
standing the doors of the second chamber remain wide 
open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to 
hasten to it, but are imperceptibly impelled by the 
awakening of the thinking principle within us. We 
no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall 
call the Chamber of Maiden Thought, than we become 
intoxicated with the light and. the atmosphere. We 
see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delay- 
ing there for ever in delight. However, among the 



effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous 
one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and 
nature of man, of convincing one's nerves that the 
world is full of misery and heart-break, pain, sickness, 
and oppression ; whereby this Chamber of Maiden 
Thought becomes gradually darkened, and, at the same 
time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open, but all 
dark — all leading to dark passages. We see not the 
balance of good and evil ; we are in a. mist ; we feel 
the 'Burden of the Mystery.' To this point was 
Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he 
wrote Tintcm Abbey: and it seems to me that his 



KEATS. 169 

genius is explorative of those dark passages. Now, 
if we live and go on thinking, we too shall explore 
them. He is a genius, and superior to us in so far as 
he can, more than we, make discoveries, and shed a 
light on them." 

As the aphorisms and casual spurts of speculation 
of a youth of twenty- two (and all the passages I 
have quoted are from letters of his written before his 
twenty-third year), these, I think, are sufficient proof 
that Keats had an intellect from which his superiority 
in some literary walk or other might have been surely 
anticipated. 

What we independently know enables us to say 
that it was pre-eminently as a poet that he was fitted 
to be distinguished. He was constitutionally a poet, 
one of those minds in whom, to speak generally, 
Imagination or Ideality is the sovereign faculty. But, 
as we had occasion to explain in the paper on 
Shelley, there are two recognised orders of poets, 
each of which has its representatives in our literature 
— that order, called " subjective," to which Shelley 
himself belonged, and whose peculiarity it is that 
their poems are vehicles for certain fixed ideas lying 
in the minds of their authors, outbursts of their per- 
sonal character, impersonations under shifting guises 
of their wishes, feelings and beliefs ; and that order, 
on the other hand, distinguished as "objective," who 



170 KEATS. 

simply fashion their creations by a kind of inventive 
craft working amid materials supplied by sense, 
memory, and reading, without the distinct infusion 
of any element of personal opinion. To this latter 
order, as I said, belong Chaucer, Shakespeare, and 
Scott. Now, indubitably, Keats, by the bulk of his 
poetry, belongs to this order too. The contrast be- 
tween him and Shelley, in this respect, is complete. 
Contemporaries and friends, they were poets of quite 
opposite schools and tendencies; and, so far as they 
were repelled by each other's poetry (which they 
were to a certain extent, despite their friendship), it 
arose from this circumstance. Unlike the feminine 
and ethereal Shelley, whose whole life was a shrill 
supernatural shriek in behalf of certain principles, 
Keats was a slack, slouching youth, with a thick 
torso, a deep grave voice, and no fixed principles. 
He had, as we have seen, his passing spurts of 
speculation, but he had no system of philosophy. 
So far as religious belief was concerned, he had no 
wish to disturb existing opinions and institutions, 
partly because he had really no such quarrel with 
them as Shelley had, partly because he had no con- 
fidence in his ability to dogmatise on such points. In 
politics, away from his personal connections, he was 
rather conservative than otherwise. He thought the 
Liverpool-and-Castlereagh policy very bad and oppres- 



KEATS. 171 



sive ; but he did not expect that his friends, the 
Liberals, would bring things very much nearer to the 
millennium ; and he distinctly avows that he was not, 
like some of his friends, a Godwin-perfectibility man, 
or an admirer of America as an advance beyond 
Europe. ' In short, he kept aloof from opinion, doc- 
trine, controversy, as by a natural instinct; he was 
most at home in the world of sense and imagery, 
where it was his pleasure to weave forth phantasies; 
and, if his intelligence did now and then indulge in 
a discursive flight, it was but by way of exercise, or 
because opinions, doctrines, and controversies may be 
considered as facts, and therefore as materials to be 
worked into poetic language. 

In quoting from Keats's letters I have purposely 
selected passages showing that such was not only his 
practice, but also his theory. His very principle of 
poetry, it will be observed, almost amounts to this, 
that the poet should have no principles. The dis- 
tinction he makes between men of genius and men 
of power is that the action of the former is like that 
of an ethereal chemical, a subtle imponderable, passing 
forth on diverse materials and rousing their affinities, 
whereas the latter impress by their solid individuality. 
So, again, when he speaks of the quality that forms 
men for great literary achievement as being what he 
calls a "negative capability" — a power of remaining, 



172 KEATS. 



and, as it were, luxuriously lolling, in doubts, mys- 
teries, and half-solutions, toying with them, and toss- 
ing them, in. all their complexity, into forms of 
beauty, instead of piercing on narrowly and in pain 
after truth absolute and inaccessible. A Wordsworth, 
he admits, might have a genius of the explorative 
or mystery-piercing kind, and might come back from 
his excursions into the region of the metaphysical 
with handfuls of new truth to be worked up into his 
phantasies. But even he might be too dogmatic; and, 
as for himself, though he might fancy that occa- 
sionally he reached the bourn of the mysterious and 
caught glimpses beyond, it would be presumption to 
put his half-seeings into speech for others ! If any 
doubt still remains on this head, the following addi- 
tional passage from one of his letters will set it at 
rest : — 

"As to the poetical character itself (I mean that 
sort of which, if I am , anything, I am a member) it 
is not itself; it has no self;, it is everything and 
nothing ; it has no character ; it enjoys light and 
shade ; it lives in gusts ; it has as much delight in 
conceiving an Iago as an Tmogen. What shocks the 
virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet, . . . 
A poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence, be- 
cause he has no identity; he is continually in, for, 
and filling, some other body. The sun, the moou, 
the sea, and men and women who are creatures of 
impulse, are poetical, and have about them an un- 



KEATS. 173 



changeable attribute ; the poet has none, no identity. 
. . . If, then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, j 
where is the wonder that I should say I would write ; 
no more ? Might I not at that very instant have 
been cogitating in the character of Saturn and Ops ? 
It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very 
fact, that not one word I utter can be taken for 
granted as an opinion growing out of my identical 
nature. How can it be when I have no nature ? 
When I am in a room with people, if I am free from 
speculating on creations of my own brain, then not 
myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every 
one in the room begins to press in upon me, so that 
I am in a very little time annihilated." 

Only on one subject does he profess to have any fixed 
opinions — namely, on his own art or craft. " I have 
not one opinion/' he says, "upon anything except 
matters of taste." This is one of the most startling 
and significant sayings ever uttered by a man respect- 
ing himself. 

If I am not mistaken, the definition which Keats 
here gives of the poetical character corresponds with 
the notion which is most popular. Though critics 
distinguish between " subjective " and " objective " 
poets, and enumerate men in the one class as famous 
as men in the other, yet, in our more vague talk, we 
are in the habit of leaving out of view those who are 
called " subjective " poets, and seeking the typical poet 
among their " objective " brethren, such as Homer and 



17'4 KEATS. 



Shakespeare. How this habit is to be explained — 
whether it proceeds from a perception that the men 
of the second order are more truly and purely poets, 
and that the others, though often glorious in poetry, 
might, in strict science, be referred in half to another 
genus — I will not inquire. It may be remarked, how- 
ever, that, be this as it may, it is by no means 
necessary to go all the length with Keats in the 
interpretation of his theory, and to fancy that the 
poet approaching most nearly to the perfect type 
must be a man having no strong individuality, no 
permanent moral gesture. Scott, for example, was a 
man of very distinct character, with a mode of think- 
ing and acting in the society in which he lived as 
proper to himself as his physiognomy or corporeal 
figure. So, no doubt, it was with Chaucer and Shake- 
speare ; and Milton, who may, by much of his poetry, 
be referred to the same order, was a man with a 
personality to shake a nation. What is meant is 
that, when they betook themselves from miscellaneous 
action among their fellows to the exercise of their 
art, they all, more or less, allowed their personality 
to melt and fold itself in the imagination. They all, 
more or less, at such times, stood within themselves, as 
within a chamber in which their own hopes, convic- 
tions, anxieties, and principles lay about neglected, 
while they plied their mighty craft, like the swing 



KEATS. 175 



of some gigantic arm, with reference to all without. 
Keats did the same ; only, in his case, the chamber 
wherein he sat had, by his own confession, very few 
fixtures or other proper furniture. It was a painter's 
studio, with very little in it besides the easel. 

Still, as cannot be too often repeated, there are 
subtle laws connecting the creations of the most 
purely artistic poet with his personal character and 
experience. The imagination, though it seems to fly 
round and round the personality, and often at a great 
distance from it, is still attached to it and governed 
by it in its flight — determined, in its wheelings to- 
wards this or that object, by incessant communica- 
tions from the total mind and reason of which it is 
at once the efflux, the envoy, and the servitor. 
Chaucer's poetry would have been different if Chaucer 
himself had been different ; Scott's novels and poems 
could have been written by no one but a man cast 
exactly in Scott's mould, even to the bushiness of his 
eyebrows and the Northumbrian burr of his speech ; 
and, had we the necessary skill in the higher criti- 
cism, even the Protean Shakespeare might be chased 
out of his dramas into his own proper form as he 
used to walk in the meadows of Stratford-upon-Avon. 
So also with the poetry of Keats. Impersonal as it 
is in comparison with such poetry as Shelley's, it 
has yet a certain assemblage of characteristics, which 



178 KEATS. 

the reader learns to recognise as distinctive ; and 
these it owes to the character of its author. 
J At the foundation of the character of Keats lay an 
extraordinary keenness of all the bodily sensibilities 
and the mental sensibilities which depend upon them. 
He led, in great part, a life of passive sensation, of 
pleasure and pain through the senses. Take a book 
of Physiology and go over the so-called classes of 
sensations one by one — the sensations of the mere 
muscular states ; the sensations connected with such 
vital processes as circulation, alimentation, respiration, 
and electrical intercommunication with surrounding 
bodies ; the sensations of taste ; those of odour ; those 
of touch : those of hearing ; and those of sight — and 
Keats will be found to have been unusually endowed 
in them all. He had, for example, an extreme sensi- 
bility to the pleasures of the palate. The painter 
Haydon tells a story of his once seeing him cover 
his tongue with cayenne pepper, in order, as he 
said, that he might enjoy the delicious sensation of a 
draught of cold claret after it. " Talking of pleasure," 
he says himself in one of his letters, " this moment 
I was writing with one hand, and with the other 
holding to my mouth a nectarine ; " and he goes on 
to describe the nectarine in language that would re- 
awaken gustativeness in the oldest fruiterer. This of 
one of the more ignoble senses, if it is right to call 



KEATS. 177 

those senses ignoble that minister the least visibly to 
the intellect But it was the same with the nobler or 
more intellectual senses of hearing and sight. He 
was passionately fond of music ; and his sensitiveness 
to colour, light, and other kinds of visual impression, 
was preternaturally acute. He possessed, in short, 
simply in virtue of his organization, a rich intellec- 
tual foundation of that kind which consists of notions 
furnished directly by sensations, and of a correspond- 
ing stock of names and terms. Even had he remained 
without education, his natural vocabulary of words 
for all the varieties of thrills, tastes, odours, sounds, 
colours, and tactual perceptions, would have been un- 
usually precise and extensive. As it was, this native 
capacity for keen and abundant sensation was de- 
veloped, educated, and harmonised, by the influences 
of reading, intellectual conversation, and more or less 
laborious thought, into that richer and more culti- 
vated sensuousness which, under the name of sensi- 
bility to natural beauty, is an accepted requisite in 
the constitution of painters and poets. 

It is a fact on which physiologists have recently 
been dwelling much, that the imagination of any 
bodily state or action calls into play exactly those 
nervous, muscular, and other processes, though in 
weaker degree, which are called into play by the real 
bodily state or action so simulated. The imagination 

N 



178 KEATS. 

of sugar in the mouth causes the same exact flow 
within the lips which would be caused by sugar really 
tasted ; the imagination of firing a rifle does actually 
compel to the entire gesture of shooting, down even 
to the bending of the forefinger round the ideal trigger, 
though the mimic altitude may be baulked of com- 
pletion ; the imagination of a pain in any part may 
be persevered in till a pain is actually induced in that 
part. Whether or not this fact shall ever serve much 
towards the elucidation of the connexion between the 
imagination and the personal character — whether or 
not it may ever be developed into a distinct doctrine 
that the habits of a man's own real being mark, by 
an a priori necessity, the directions in which his 
imagination will work most naturally and strongly — 
one can hardly avoid thinking of it in studying the 
genius of Keats. The most obvious characteristic of 
Keats's poetry is certainly its abundant sensuousness. 
Some of his finest little poems are all but literally 
lyrics of the sensuous, embodiments of the feelings of 
ennui, fatigue, physical languor, and the like, in tissues 
of fancied circumstance and sensation. Thus, in the 
well-known Ode to the Nightingale — 

" My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, 
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk." 



KEATS. 179 

In this state lie hears the nightingale, and straightway 
finds his cure — 

" for a draught of vintage that hath been 
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, 
Tasting, of Flora and the country-green, 

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth ! 
for a beaker full of the warm South, 
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim 
And purple-stained mouth, 
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 
And with thee fade away into the forest dim." 

It is the same in those longer pieces of narrative phan- 
tasy which form the larger portion of his writings. 
Selecting, as in Endymion, a legend of the Grecian 
mythology, or, as in Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, a 
story from Boccaccio, or, as in The Eve of St. Agnes, 
the hint of a middle-age superstition, or, as in Lamia, 
a story of Greek witchcraft, he sets himself to weave 
out the little text of substance so given into a Ijjiked 
succession of imaginary movements and incidents 
taking place in the dim depths of ideal scenery, 
whether of forest, grotto, sea-shore, the interior of a 
Gothic castle, or the marble vestibule of a Corinthian 
palace. In following him in these luxurious excur- 
sions into a world of ideal nature and life, we see his 
imagination winging about, as if it were his disem- 
bodied senses hovering insect-like in one humming 

N 2 



180 KEATS. 

group, all keeping together in harmony at the bidding 
of a higher intellectual power, and yet each catering 
for itself in that species of circumstance which is its 
peculiar food. Thus, the disembodied sense of Taste — 

" Here is wine 
Alive with sparkles — never, I aver, 
Since Ariadne was a vintager, 
So cool a purple : taste these juicy pears, 
Sent me by sad Vertumnus, when his fears 
Were high about Pomona : here is cream 
Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam — 
Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimm'd 
For the boy Jupiter ; and here, undimm'd 
By any touch, a bunch of blooming plums 
Eeady to melt between an infant's gums." 

Or, again, in the description of the dainties in the 
chapel in the The Eve of St. Agnes — 

" And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep 
In blanched linen, smooth and lavender'd, 
"While he from forth the closet brought a heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd, 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon, 
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd 
From Fez, and spiced dainties every one 
From silken Samarcand to eedar'd Lebanon." 

As an instance of the disembodied delight in sweet 
odour, take the lines in Isabella— 



KEATS. 181 



" Then in a silken scarf, sweet with the dews 
Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby, 
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze 
Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully, 
She wrapp'd it up." 

Delicacy and richness in ideal sensations of touch and 
sound are found throughout. Thus, even the sensa- 
tion of cold water on the hands : — 

" When in an antechamber every guest 
Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press'd 
By ministering slaves upon his hands and feet " ; 

or the ideal tremulation of a string : — 

" Be thou in the van 
Of circumstance ; yea, seize the arrow's barb 
Before the tense string murmur." 

But let us pass to the sense of sight, with its various 
perceptions of colour, light, and lustre. Here Keats 
is, in some respects, facile princess, even among our 
most sensuous poets. Here is the description of 
Lamia while she was still a serpent: — 

" She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, 
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue, 
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, 
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson-barr'd, 
And full of silver moons that, as she breathed, 
Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed 
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries." 



182 KEATS. 



Here is a passage somewhat more various, the 

description of the bower in which Adonis was 

sleejDing — 

" Above his head 
Tour lily-stalks did their white honours wed 
To make a coronal ; and round him grew 
All tendrils green, of every bloom and hue, 
Together intertwined and trameH'd fresh : 
The vine of glossy sprout ; the ivy mesh, 
Shading the Ethiop berries ; and woodbine, 
Of velvet leaves, and bugle-blooms divine ; 
Convolvulus in streamed vases flush ; 
The creeper, mellowing for an autumn blush ; 
And virgin's bower, trailing airily ; 
With others of the sisterhood." 

These last quotations suggest a remark which does 
not seem unimportant. When critics or poets them- 
selves speak of the love of nature or the perception 
of natural beauty as essential in the constitution of 
the poet, it will often be found that what they chiefly 
mean is an unusual sensibility to the pleasures of 
one of the senses— the sense of sight. What they 
mean is chiefly a fine sense of form, colour, lustre, 
and the like. Now, though it may be admitted that, 
in so far as ministration of material for the intellect 
is concerned, sight is the most important of the 
senses, yet this all but absolute identification of love 
of nature with sensibility to visual pleasures seems 



KEATS. 183 



erroneous. It is a kind of treason to the other senses, 
all of which are avenues of communication between 
nature and the mind, though sight may be the main 
avenue. In this respect I believe that one of the 
most remarkable characteristics of Keats is the uni- ' 
versality of his sensuousness. 

But farther. Not only, in popular language, does 
the love of nature seem to be identified with a sen- 
sibility to the pleasures of the one sense of sight; 
but, by a more injurious restriction still, this love of 
nature or perception of natural beauty seems to have 
been identified, especially of late, with one class of 
the pleasures of this one sense of sight — to wit, the 
pleasures derived from the contemplation of vegeta- 
tion. Eoses, lilies, grass, trees, cornfields, ferns, heaths, 
and poppies : these are what pass for " nature " with 
not a few modern poets and critics of poetry. It 
seems as if, since Wordsworth fulminated the advice 
to poets to go back to nature and to study nature, it 
had been the impression of many that the proper way 
to comply with the advice was to walk out in the 
fields to some spot where the grass was thick and the 
weeds and wild-flowers plentiful, and there lie flat 
upon the turf, chins downwards, peering into grasses 
and flowers, and inhaling their breath. Now, it ought 
to be distinctly represented, in correction of this, that 
ever so minute and loving a study of vegetation, 



184 KEATS. 

though laudable and delightful in itself, does not 
amount to a study of nature — that, in fact, vegeta- 
tion, though a very respectable part of visible nature, 
is not the whole of it. When night comes, for 
example, where or how much is your vegetation 
then ? Vegetation is not nature : I know no pro- 
position that should be more frequently dinned in 
the ears of our young poets than this. The peculiar 
notion of natural beauty involved in the habit spoken 
of may be said to have come in with the microscope. 
In the ancient Greek poets we have very little of it. 
They give us trees and grass and flowers, but they 
give them more by mere suggestion; and, so far as 
they introduce physical nature at all (which is chiefly 
by way of a platform for human action), it is with the 
larger forms and aspects of nature that they deal, the 
wide and simple modifications of the great natural 
elements. Shakespeare, when he chooses, is minutely 
and lusciously rich in his scenes of vegetation (and, 
indeed, in comparing modern and romantic with 
ancient and classical poets generally, it is clear that, 
in this respect, there has been a gradual development 
of literary tendency) ; but no man more signally than 
Shakespeare keeps the just proportion. Wordsworth 
himself, when he called out for the study of nature, 
and set the example in his own case by retiring to the 
Lakes, did not commit the error of confounding nature 



KEATS. 185 

with vegetation. In that district, indeed, where there 
are mountains and tarns, incessant cloud-variations, 
and other forms of nature on the great scale, to em- 
ploy the eye, it was not likely that it would dispro- 
portionately exercise itself on particular banks and 
gardens or individual herbs and flowers. Such an 
affection for the minutiae of vegetation was reserved 
perhaps for the so-called Cockney poets ; and one can 
see that, if it were once supposed that they introduced 
the taste, the fact might be humorously explained by 
recollecting that nature to most of them was nature 
as seen from Hampstead Heath. 

Now, undoubtedly, Keats is great in botanical cir- 
cumstance. Here is a passage in which he describes 
the kind of home he would like to live in for the 
purpose of writing poetry : — 

" Ah ! surely it must be where'er I find 
Some flowery spot, sequester'd, wild, romantic, 
That often must have seen a poet frantic ; 
Where oaks that erst the Druid knew are growing, 
And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing ; 
Where the dark-leaved laburnum's drooping clusters 
Eeflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres, 
And, intertwined, the cassia's arms unite 
With its own drooping buds, but very white ; 
Where on one side are covert branches hung, 
'Mong which the nightingales have always sung 
In leafy quiet ; where to pry aloof 
Between the pillars of the sylvan roof 



186 KEATS. 

Would be to find where violet buds are nestling, 
And where the bee with cowslip bells was wrestling : 
There must be too a ruin dark and gloomy, 
To say ' Joy not too much in all that's bloomy.' " 

Again, in the hymn to Pan in Endymion: — 

" thou whose mighty palace-roof doth hang 
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth 
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death 
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness ; 
"Who lovest to see the Hamadryads dress 
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken, 
And through whole solemn hours dost sit and hearken 
The dreary melody of bedded reeds 
In desolate places where dank moisture breeds 
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth, 
Bethinking thee how melancholy loth 
Thou wast to leave fair Syrinx — do thou now, 
By thy love's milky brow ! 
By all the trembling mazes that she ran ! 
Hear us, great Pan ! " 

But, though Keats did "joy in all that is bloomy," 
I do not know that he joyed " too much." Though 
luscious vegetation was one of his delights, I do not 
think that in him there is such a disproportion be- 
tween this and other kinds of imagery as there has 
been in other and inferior poets. There are sea and 
cloud in his poetry, as well as herbage and turf; he 
is as rich in mineralogical and zoological circumstance 



KEATS. 187 



as in that of botany. His most obvious characteristic, 
I repeat, is the universality of his sensuousness. And 
this it is, added to his exquisite mastery in language 
and verse, that makes it such a luxury to read him. 
In reading Shelley, even when we admire him most, 
there is always a sense of pain ; the influence of 
Keats is uniformly soothing. In part, as I have said, 
this arises from his exquisite mastery in language and 
verse — which, in itself, is one form or result of his 
sensuousness. There is hardly any recent poet in con- 
nexion with whom the mechanism of verse in relation 
to thought may be studied more delightfully. Occa- 
sionally, it is true, there is the shock of a horrible 
Cockney rhyme. Thus : — 

" I shall a^ain see Phoebus in the morning:, 
Or flushed Aurora in the roseate dawnino-." 

Or worse still : — 

" Couldst thou wish for lineage higher 
Than twin-sister of Thalia ? " 

Throughout, too, there are ungainly traces of the de- 
pendence of the matter upon the rhyme. But where, 
on the whole, shall we find language softer and 
richer, verse more harmonious and sweetly-linked, 
and, though usually after the model of some older 
poet, more thoroughly novel and original ; or where 



188 KEATS. 

shall we see more beautifully exemplified the power 
of that high artifice of rhyme by which, as by little 
coloured lamps of light thrown out in advance of the 
prow of their thoughts from moment to moment, poets 
steer their way so windingly through the fantastic 
gloom ? 

In virtue of that unusual and universal sensuous- 
ness which all must discern in Keats (and which, 
as being perhaps his most distinctive characteristic, 
I have chosen chiefly to illustrate in the quotations 
I have made), he would certainly have been very 
memorable among English poets, even had there been 
less in him than there was of that power of reflective 
and constructive intellect by which alone so abundant 
a wealth of the sensuous could have been ruled and 
shaped into artistic forms. The earlier poems of 
Shakespeare were, in the main, tissues of sensuous 
phantasy; and I believe that, compared even with 
these, the poems that Keats has left us would not 
seem inferior, if the comparison could be impartially 
made. The same might be said of certain portions of 
Spenser's poetry, the resemblance of which to much 
of Keats's would strike any reader acquainted with 
both poets, even if he did not know that Keats was a 
student of Spenser. Perhaps the likest poet to Keats 
in the whole list of preceding English poets is William 
Browne, the author of " Britannia's Pastorals ; " but, 



KEATS. 189 

rich and pleasant as the poetry of Browne is, beyond 
much that capricious chance has preserved in greater 
repute, that of Keats is, in Browne's own qualities of 
richness and pleasantness, immeasurably superior. 

Neither sensuousness alone, however, nor sensuous- 
ness governed by a reflective and fanciful intellect, 
will constitute a great poet. However highly endowed 
a youthful poet may be in these, his only chance of 
real greatness is in passing on, by due transition and 
gradation, to that more matured state of mind in 
which, though the sensuous may remain and the cool 
fancy may weave its tissues as before, human interest 
and sympathy with the human heart and grand human 
action shall predominate in all. 'Now, in the case of 
Keats, there is evidence of the fact of this gradation. 
There is evidence of a progress both intellectually and 
morally; of a disposition, already consciously known 
to himself, to move forward out of the sensuous or 
merely sensuous-ideal mood, into the mood of the 
truly epic poet, the poet of life, sublimity and action. 
Thus, in one of his prose letters, he says, "Although 
I take Poetry to be the chief, yet there is something 
else wanting to one who passes his life among books 
and thoughts of books." And again, "I find earlier 
days are gone by ; I find that I can have no enjoy- 
ment in the world but continual drinking of know- 
ledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea 



190 KEATS. 



of doing some good to the world. Some do it with 
their society ; some with their art ; some with their 
benevolence; some with a sort of power of conferring 
pleasure and good humour on all they meet — and, in 
a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of nature. 
There is but one way for me. * The road lies through 
application, study and thought. I will pursue it. I 
have been hovering for some time between an ex- 
quisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philo- 
sophy. Were I calculated for the former, I should be 
glad ; but, as I am not, I shall turn all my soul to 
the latter." In his poetry we have similar evidence. 
Even in his earlier poems one is struck not only by 
the steady presence of a keen and subtle intellect, but 
also by frequent flashes of permanently deep mean- 
ing, frequent lines of lyric thoughtfulness, and occa- 
sional maxims of weighty historic generality. J What 
we have quoted for our special purpose would fail 
utterly to convey the proper impression of the merits 
of Keats in these respects, or indeed of his poetic 
genius generally, unless the memory of the reader 
were to suggest the necessary supplement. From En- 
dymion itself, sensuous to very wildness as the poem 
is considered, scores of passages might be quoted 
to prove that already, while it was being written, 
intellect, feeling, and experience were doing their work 
with Keats — that, to use his own figure, he had 



KEATS. 191 

then already advanced for some time out of the Infant 
Chamber, or Chamber of mere Sensation, into the 
Chamber of Maiden Thought, and had even there 
begun to distinguish the openings of the dark passages 
beyond and around, and to be seized with the longing 
to explore them. Seeing this, looking then at such of 
his later poems as Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes, 
and contemplating last of all that wonderful fragment 
of Hyperion which he hurled into the world as he 
was leaving it, and of winch Byron but expressed the 
common opinion when he said " It seems actually in- 
spired by the Titans, and is as sublime as iEschylus," 
we can hardly be wrong in believing that, had 
Keats lived to the ordinary age of man, he would 
have been one of the greatest of all our poets. As 
it is, though he died at the age of twenty-five, and 
left only what in all does not amount to much more 
than a day's leisurely reading, I believe we shall all 
be disposed to place him very near indeed to our 
very best. 



V. 

THEORIES OF POETRY. 



o 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 1 

There have been hundreds of disquisitions on poetry 
in all ages, long and short, good, bad, and indifferent ; 
and, now-a-days, we cannot open a magazine or a re- 
view without finding something new said about our 
friend u The Poet," as distinguished from our other 
friend " The Prophet " and the rest. But cant cannot 
be helped ; and, if we are to abandon good phrases 
because they have been used a great many times, 
there is an end to all reviewing. 

Much, however, as has been spoken about poetry 
and poets, it may be doubted whether the world, in 
its meditations on this subject, has got far beyond 
the antithesis suggested by what Aristotle said about 
it two thousand years ago, on the one hand, and what 
Bacon advanced two hundred and fifty years ago, on 

1 North British Review, August 1853. — "Poetics: an Essay on 
Poetry." By E. S. Dallas. London, 1852. 

2 



196 THEORIES OF POETRY. 



the other. At least, acquainted as we are with a good 
deal that Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Goethe, and 
Leigh Hunt, and now Mr. Dallas, have written about 
poetry "by way of more subtle and insinuating investi- 
gation, we still feel that the best notion of the thing, 
for any manageable purpose, is to be beaten out of 
the rough-hewn definitions of it, from opposite sides, 
supplied by Aristotle and Bacon. In his Poetics, 
Aristotle writes as follows : — 

"Epic poetry and the poetry of tragedy, as well as 
comedy and dithyrambic poetry, and most flute and 
lyre music, all are, in their nature, viewed generally, 
imitations (/M/urjo-eis) ; differing from each other, how- 
ever, in three things — either in that they imitate by 
different means, or in that they imitate different things, 
or in that they imitate differently and not in the same 
manner. For, as some artists, either from technical 
training or from mere habit, imitate various objects by 
colours and forms, and other artists by vocal sound, 
so, of the arts mentioned above, all effect their imita- 
tion by rhythm, and words, and melody, employed 
either severally or in combination, lor example, in 
flute and lyre music, and in any other kind of music 
having similar effect, such as pipe music, melody and 
rhythm are alone used. In the dance, again, the imi- , 
tation is accomplished by rhythm by itself, without 
melody; there being dancers who, by means of rhythmi- 
cal gesticulations, imitate even manners, passions, and 
acts. Lastly, epic poetry produces its imitations either 
by mere articulate words, or by metre superadded. ... 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 197 

Since, in the second place, those who imitate copy 
living characters, it behoves imitations either to be of 
serious and lofty, or of mean and trivial objects. The 
imitation must, in fact, either be of characters and 
actions better than they are found among ourselves, 
or worse, or much the same ; just as, among painters, 
Polygnotus represented people better-looking than they 
were, Pauson worse-looking, and Dionysius exactly as 
they were. Now, it is evident that each of the arts 
above mentioned will have these differences, the dif- 
ference arising from their imitating different things. 
In the dance, and in flute and lyre music, these 
diversities are visible ; as also in word-imitations and 
simple metre. Homer, for example, really made men 
better than they are ; Cleophon made them such as 
they are ; whereas Hegemon, the first writer of paro- 
dies, and Mcochares, made them worse. So also, in 
dithyrambics and lyrics, one might, with Timotheus 
and Philoxenus, imitate even Persians and Cyclopes. 
By this very difference, too, is tragedy distinguished from 
comedy. The one even now strives in its imitations to 
exhibit men better than they are, the other worse. . . . 
Still the third difference remains : namely, as to the 
manner or form of the imitation. For, even though the 
means of imitation, and the things imitated, should be 
the same, there might be this difference, that the imi- 
tation might be made either in the form of a narration 
(and that either through an alien narrator, as Homer 
does, or in one's own person without changing) or by 
representing the imitators as all active and taking part. 
So that, though in one respect Homer and Sophocles 
would go together as imitators, as both having earnest 
subjects, in another Sophocles and Aristophanes would 



198 THEORIES OF POETRY. 



go together, as both imitating dramatically. . . . Two 
causes, both of them natural, seem to have operated 
together to originate the poetic art. The first is that 
the tendency to imitate is innate in men from child- 
hood (the difference between man and other animals 
being that he is the most imitative of all, acquiring 
even his first lessons in knowledge through imitation) 

and that all take pleasure in imitation In 

the second place, just as the tendency to imitate is 
natural to us, so also is the love of melody and of 
rhythm ; and metre is evidently a variety of rhythm. 
Those, therefore, who from the first were most strongly 
inclined to these things by nature, proceeding by little 
and little, originated poetry out of their impromptu 
fancies. Poetry, thus originated, was broken into de- 
partments corresponding to the peculiar characters of 
its producers, the more serious imitating only beautiful 
actions and jbheir issues, while the more thoughtless 
natures imitated mean incidents, inventing lampoons, 
as others had invented hymns and eulogies. Before 
Homer we have no poem of this kind to be mentioned, 
though doubtless many existed." 

Such, as indicated in those sentences of the treatise 
which seem to be of most essential import, is the 
general doctrine of Aristotle as to the nature of Poetrv. 
With this contrast Bacon's theory, as stated, cursorily 
but profoundly, in the following sentences from the 
Advancement of Learning : — 

" The parts of Human Learning have reference to the 
three parts of man's understanding, which is the seat 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 101) 

of learning — History to his Memory ; Poesy to his 
Imagination ; and Philosophy to his Eeason. . . . Poesy 
is a part of learning, in measure of words for the most 
part restrained, but in all other points extremely 
licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination ; 
which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at 
pleasure join that which Nature hath severed, and 
sever that which Nature hath joined, and so make 
unlawful matches and divorces of things. Pictoribus 
atque Poetis, &c. It [Poetry] is taken in two senses — 
in respect of words, or matter. In the first sense, it is 
but a character of style, and belongeth to the arts of 
speech, and is not pertinent for the present ; in the 
latter, it is, as hath been said, one of the principal 
portions of learning, and is nothing else but Feigned 
History, which may be styled as well in prose as in 
verse. The use of this Feigned History hath been to 
give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in 
the points wherein the nature of things doth deny it — 
the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by 
reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a 
more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a 
more absolute variety than can be found in the nature 
of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true 
history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the 
mind of man, Poesy feigneth acts and events greater 
and more heroical; because true history propoundeth 
the successes and the issues of actions not so agree- 
able to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore Poesy 
feigneth them more just in retribution, and more 
according to revealed Providence; because true his- 
tory representeth actions and events more ordinary 
and less interchanged, therefore Poesy endueth them 



200 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

with more rareness : so as it appeareth that Poesy 
serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and 
delectation. And, therefore, it was ever thought to 
have some participation of divineness, "because it 
doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows 
of things to the desires of the mind, whereas Eeason 
doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of 
things. ... In this third part of learning, which is 
Poesy, I can report no deficience. For, being as a 
plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a 
formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more 
than any other kind." 

JSTow, though it would be possible so to stretch and 
comment upon Aristotle's theory of poetry as to make 
it correspond with Bacon's, yet, prima facie, the two 
theories are different, and even antithetical. If both 
are true, it is because the theorists tilt at opposite 
sides of the shield. Aristotle makes the essence of 
Poetry to consist in its being imitative and truthful; 
Bacon, in its' being creative and fantastical. According 
to Aristotle, there is a natural tendency in men to the 
imitation of what they see in nature ; the various arts 
are nothing more than imitations, so to speak, with dif- 
ferent kinds of imitating substance ; and poetry is that 
art which imitates in articulate language, or, at most, 
in language elevated and rendered more rich and ex- 
quisite by the addition of metre. According to Bacon, 
on the other hand, there is a natural tendency, and 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 201 

a natural prerogative, in the mind of man to condition 
the universe anew for its own intellectual satisfaction. 
It may brood over the sea of actual existences, carry- 
ing on the work of creation, with these existences for 
the material, and its own phantasies and longings for 
the informing spirit ; it may be ever on the wing 
among nature's sounds and appearances, not merely 
for the purpose of observing and co-ordinating them, 
but also that it may delight itself with new ideal com- 
binations, severing what nature has joined, and joining 
what nature has put asunder. Poetry, in accordance 
with this view, might perhaps be defined as the art of 
producing, by means of articulate language, metrical 
or unmetrical, a fictitious concrete, either like to some- 
thing existing in nature, or, if unlike anything there 
existing, justifying that unlikeness by the charm of its 
own impressiveness. 

Amid all the discussions of all the critics as to the 
nature of poetry, this antagonism, if such it is, be- 
tween the Aristotelian and the Baconian theories, will 
be found eternally reproducing itself. 

When Wordsworth denned poetry to be " emotion 
recollected in tranquillity," and declared it to be the 
business of the poet to represent out of real life, and 
as nearly as possible in the language of real life, scenes 
and events of an affecting or exciting character, he 
reverted, and with good effect, to the imitation-theory 



202 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

of Aristotle. All Coleridge's disquisitions, on the other 
hand, even when his friend Wordsworth is the theme 
and exemplar, are subtle developments of the imagina- 
tion-theory of Bacon. His famous remark that the 
true antithesis is not Poetry and Prose, but Poetry and 
Science, is but another form of Bacon's remark, that, 
whereas it is the part of Eeason "to buckle and bow 
the mind to the nature of things/' it is the part of 
Imagination, as the poetical faculty, " to raise the mind 
by submitting the shows of things to its desires." And 
so with the definitions, more or less formal, of other 
writers. Thus Leigh Hunt: "Poetry is the utterance 
of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying 
and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and 
fancy, and modulating its language on the principle 
of variety in uniformity." That this definition, not- 
withstanding that it is constructed on the principle of 
omitting nothing that any one would like to see in- 
cluded, is yet essentially a glimpse from the Baconian 
side of the shield, is obvious from the fact that its 
author afterwards uses as synonymous with it the 
abbreviations " Imaginative passion," " Passion for im- 
aginative pleasure." Lastly, Mr. Dallas, with all his 
ingenuity, does not really get much farther in the end. 
Beginning with an expression of dissatisfaction with all 
existing definitions of poetry, Aristotle's and Bacon's 
included, as being definitions of the thing not in itself, 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 203 

but in its accidents, he proceeds first, very properly, to 
make a distinction between poetical feeling, which all 
men have, and the art of poetical expression, which is 
the prerogative of those who are called poets. Both 
are usually included under the term Poetry; but, to 
avoid confusion. Mr. Dallas proposes to use the general 
term Poetry for the poetical feeling, and to call the art 
which caters for that feeling Poesy. Then, taking for 
his guide the fact that all have agreed that, whatever 
poetry is, it has pleasure for its end, he seeks to work 
his way to the required definition through a prior 
analysis of the nature of pleasure. Having, as the 
result of this analysis, defined pleasure to be " the har- 
monious and unconscious activity of the soul," he finds 
his way then clear. For there are various kinds of 
pleasure, and poetry is one of these. It is " imagina- 
tive pleasure;" or, if we write the thing more fully 
out, it is the "imaginative harmonious and uncon- 
scious activity of the soul," or that kind of harmonious 
and unconscious activity of the soul which consists in 
the exercise of the imagination. Poesy, of course, is 
the corresponding art, the art of producing what will 
give imaginative pleasure. Now, with all our respect 
for the ability with which Mr. Dallas conducts his 
investigation, and our relish for the many lucid and 
deep remarks which drop from his pen in the course 
of it, we must say that, as respects the main matter 



204 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

in discussion, his investigation does not leave us fully 
satisfied. " Poetry is imaginative pleasure " : very 
well ; but Bacon had said substantially the same 
thing when he described poetry as a kind of literature 
having reference to the imagination; and Leigh Hunt 
had, as we have seen, anticipated the exact phrase, 
defining poetry to be " imaginative passion,''' and the 
faculty of the poet to be the faculty of "producing 
imaginative pleasure." In short, the whole difficulty, 
the very essence of the question, consists not in the 
word pleasure, but in the word imaginative. Had Mr. 
Dallas bestowed half the pains on the illustration of 
what is meant by imagination that he has bestowed 
on the analysis of what is meant b} T pleasure, he would 
have done the science of poetry more service. This — 
the nature of the imaginative faculty — is "the vapor- 
ous drop profound that hangs upon the corner of the 
moon," and Mr. Dallas has not endeavoured to catch it. 
His chapter upon the Law of Imagination is one of the 
most cursory in the book ; and the total result, as 
far as a fit definition of poetry is concerned, is that 
he ends in finding himself in the same hut with 
Bacon, after having refused its shelter. 

The antagonism between the Aristotelian theory, 
which makes poetry to consist in imitative passion, 
and the Baconian theory, which makes it to consist in 
imaginative passion, is curiously reproducing itself at 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 205 

present [1853] in the kindred art of painting. Pre- 
Raphaelitism is in painting very much what the reform 
led by Wordsworth was in poetical literature. Imitate 
nature ; reproduce her exact and literal forms ; do 
not paint ideal trees or vague recollections of trees, 
ideal brick-walls or vague recollections of brick-walls, 
but actual trees and actual brick- walls; dismiss from 
your minds the trash of Sir Joshua Reynolds about 
" correcting nature/' " improving nature," and the 
like ; — such are the maxims addressed by the Pre- 
Raphaelites, both with brush and with pen, to their 
fellow-artists. All this is, we say, a return to the theory 
of Aristotle, which makes the essence of art to consist 
in Imitation, and a protest against that of Bacon, 
which makes the essence of art to consist in Ideali- 
zation. Poor Sir Joshua Reynolds ought to fall back 
upon Bacon, so that, when he is next attacked for 
his phrases " improving nature " and the like, the Pre- 
Raphaelites may see looming behind him the more 
formidable figure of a man whose words no one dares 
to call trash, and whose very definition of art was 
couched in expressions like these : " There is, agree- 
able to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a 
more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than 
can be found in the nature of things " " The use of 
feigned history is to give to the mind of man some 
shadow of satisfaction in those points wherein the 



206 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

nature of things doth deny it." The battle, we say, 
must be fought with these phrases. Nor is the battle 
confined to the art of painting. There is a more 
restricted kind of Pre-Eaphaelitism now making its 
way in the department of fictitious literature. Admir- 
ing the reality, the truthfulness, of Thackeray's deli- 
neations of life and society, there are men who will 
have nothing to do with what they call the phan- 
tasies and caricatures of the Dickens school. The 
business of the novelist, they say, is to represent men 
as they are, with all their foibles as well as their 
virtues; in other words, to imitate real life. Here 
again comes in the Baconian thunder. "Because the 
acts or events of true history have not that magnitude 
which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy (and Bacon's 
definition of poesy includes prose fiction) feigneth 
acts and events greater and more heroical." Whether 
Dickens can take the benefit of this authority, in 
those cases where he is charged with unreality, we 
need not inquire; it evidently points, however, to a 
possible style of prose fiction different .from that of 
Fielding and Thackeray, and yet as legitimate in the 
view of art. 

For ourselves, we hold the imitation-theory as 
applied to poetry or art to be so inadequate in 
essential respects that it would be time lost to try 
to mend it; and we find no suitable statement of 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 207 

what seems to be the very idea of poetry, except 
in some definition like that of Bacon. 

Only consider the matter for a moment. Take any 
piece of verse from any poet, and in what single 
respect can that piece of verse be said to be an imi- 
tation of nature? In the first place, that it is verse 
at all is a huge deviation in itself from what is, in 
any ordinary sense, natural. Men do not talk in good 
literary prose, much less in blank verse or rhyme. 
Macbeth, in his utmost strait and horror — Lear, when 
the lightnings scathed his white head — did not actually 
talk in metre. Even Bruce at Bannockburn did not 
address his army in trochees. Here, then, at the very 
outset, there is a break-down in the theory of Imita- 
tion, or literal truth to nature. And all prose literature 
shares in this break-down. Not a single personage in 
Scott's novels would have spoken precisely as Scott 
makes them speak ; nay, nor is there a single character 
in Thackeray himself strictly and in every respect a 
fac-simile of what is real. Correct grammar, sentences 
of varied lengths and of various cadences, much more 
octosyllabic or pentameter verse, and still more rhymed 
stanzas, are all artificialities. Literature has them, but 
in real life they are not to be found. It is as truly 
a deviation from nature to represent a king talking in 
blank verse, or a lover plaining in rhyme, as it is, in 
an opera, to make a martyr sing a song and be encored 



208 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

before being thrown into the flames. So far as truth 
to nature is concerned, an opera, or even a ballet, is 
hardly more artificial than a drama. Suppose, how- 
ever, that, in order to escape from this difficulty, it 
should be said that metre, rhyme, rhetorical consecu- 
tiveness, and the like, are conditions previously and 
for other reasons existing in the material in which 
the imitation is to take place : would the theory of 
imitation or truth to nature even then hold good ? Let 
it be granted that grammatical and rhythmical prose is 
a kind of marble, that blank verse is a kind of jasper, 
and that rhymed verse is a kind of amethyst or 
opaline; that the selection of those substances as the 
materials in which the imitation is to be effected is 
a thing already and independently determined on ; and 
that it is only in so far as imitation can be achieved 
consistently with the nature of those substances that 
imitation and art are held to be synonymous. Will the 
theory even then look the facts in the face ? It will 
not. In the time of Aristotle, indeed, when most 
Greek poetry was, to a greater degree than poetry is 
now, either directly descriptive or directly narrative, 
the theory might have seemed less astray than it must 
to us. Even then, however, it was necessarily at fault. 
The Achilles and the Ajax of Homer, the (Edipus and 
the Antigone of Sophocles, were, in no sense, imitations 
from nature; they were ideal beings, never seen on 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 209 



any iEgcean coast, and dwelling nowhere save in the 
halls of imagination. Aristotle himself felt this; and 
hence, at the risk of cracking into pieces his own 
fundamental theory, he indulges occasionally in a 
strain like that of Bacon when he maintains that 
poetry " representeth actions and events less ordinary 
and interchanged, and endueth them with more rare- 
ness," than is found in nature. " The poet's busi- 
ness," says Aristotle, " is not to tell events as they 
have actually happened, but as they possibly might 
happen." And again : " Poetry is more philosophical 
and more sublime than history." Very true : but what 
then becomes of the imitation ? In what possible 
sense can there be imitation unless there is something 
to be imitated ? If that something is ideal, if it exists 
not actually and outwardly, but only in the mind of 
the artist, then imitation is the wrong word to use. 

All this will be much more obvious if we refer to 
modern poetry. Here is a stanza from Spenser — part 
of his description of the access to Mammon's cave 
He has just described Eevenge, Jealousy, Fear, Shame 
and other entities.. 

" And over them sad Horror with grim hue 
Did always soar, beating his iron wings ; 
And after him owls and night-ravens flew, 
The hateful messengers of heavy things, 
Of death and dolour telling sad tidings 



210 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

While sad Celeno, sitting on a clift, 
A song of bale and bitter sorrow sings, 
That heart of Hint asunder could have rift ; 
Which having ended, after him she flieth swift." 

This is true poetry ; and yet, by no possible ingenuity, 
short of that which identified King Jeremiah with 
pickled cucumbers, could it be shown to consist of 
imitation. If it be said that it is mimic creation, and 
that this is the sense in which Aristotle meant his 
imitation, or yLt/^^crt?, to be understood, we shall be 
very glad to accept the explanation ; but then we shall 
have to reply that, as the essence of the business lies in 
the word " creation " as the substantive of the phrase, 
it is a pity the brunt of the disquisition should have 
been borne so long by the adjective. Aristotle, we 
believe, did mean that poetry was, in the main, fiction, 
or invention of fables in imitation of nature ; but, un- 
fortunately, even then he misleads by making imita- 
tion, which is but the jackal in the treatise, seem the 
lion in the definition. Nor even then will his theory 
be faultless and complete. Spenser's grim-hued Horror, 
soaring aloft, beating his iron wings, and with owls and 
night-ravens after him, is certainly a creation ; but in 
what sense it is a mimic creation, or a creation in 
imitation of nature, it would take a critic, lost to all 
reasonable use of words, to show. 

In short, and to close this discussion with a phrase 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 211 

which seems to us to fall like a block of stone through 
all our reasonings about art imitating nature, being 
true to nature, and the like, " Art is called art," said 
Goethe, " simply because it is not nature." This, it 
will be seen, is identical with Bacon's poesy " sub- 
mitting the shows of things to the desires of the 
mind." Only in one sense can it be said that the art 
itself comes under the denomination of nature. Thus, 
Shakespeare — 

" E'en that art, 

Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art 

That nature makes." 

True, as Goethe would have been the first to admit ! 
In this sense, Spenser's grim-hued Horror beating 
his iron wings was a part of nature, because, in this 
sense, the poet's own soul, with that very imagination 
starting out of it, was involved and contained in the 
universal round. But in any sense in which the words 
art and nature are available for the purposes of critical 
exposition, Goethe's saying is irrefragable : " Art is 
called art simply because it is not nature." Dissolve 
the poet through nature, regard the creative act itself 
as a part of nature, and then, of course, poetry or 
art is truth to nature. But keep them distinct, as 
you must do if you talk of imitation, and then 
the poet is nature's master, changer, tyrant, lover, 
watcher, slave, and mimic, all in one, his head now low 

r 2 



212 ■ THEORIES OF POETRY. 

in her lap and again, a moment after, she scared and 
weeping because, though he is with her, he minds 
her not. 

All this, we believe, it is very necessary to say. 
Pre-Eaphaelitism in painting, like Wordsworth's re- 
form in poetical literature (which reform consisted 
in the precept and example of what may be called 
Pre-Drydenism), we regard, so far as it is a recall of 
art to truth and observation, as an unmixed good. But 
it is essentially, in this particular respect, a reform only 
in the language of art ; and art itself is not language, 
but the creative use of it. We believe the Pre- 
Eaphaelites know this ; for, though, in theorizing, they 
naturally put forward their favourite idea of imitation 
or truthfulness, yet in their practice they are as much 
imaginative artists as imitative. While in any of the 
higher Pre-Eaphaelite paintings the language of the 
painting — that is, the flowers, grasses, foliage, brick- 
wails, and costumes — may be more real and true to 
fact than elsewhere, yet the thought which this language 
is used to convey is as ideal, as much a supposition, 
imagination, or recombination, as much a mere wish or 
utinam, as in the majority of other pictures. Still, in 
our theory of art at the present day, or at least in our 
theory of literary art, the notion of imitation is begin- 
ning to exist in excess. The very power of that most 
admirable novelist, Thackeray, is beginning to spoil us. 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 213 

We will have nothing but reality, nothing but true 
renderings of men and women as they are ; no giants or 
demigods any more, but persons of ordinary stature, 
and the black and the white in character so mixed that 
people shall neither seem crows nor white doves, but 
all more or less magpies. Good, certainly, all this ; 
but, had the rule always been peremptory, where had 
been our Achilleses, our Prometheuses, our Tancreds, 
our Lears, our Hamlets, our Fausts, our Egmonts ; 
these men that never were, these idealizations of what 
might be — not copied from nature, but imagined and 
full-fashioned by the soul of man, and thence disen- 
chained into nature, magnificent phantasms, to roam 
amid its vacancies ? Nor will it do to exempt the epic 
and the tragic muses, and to subject to the rule only 
the muse of prose fiction. Where, in that case, had 
been our Quixotes, our Pantagruels and Panurges, our 
Ivanhoes and Rebeccas, our Fixleins and Siebenkaeses ? 
These were sublimations of nature, not imitations ; 
suggestions to history by genius and an inspired phi- 
losophy. The muse of prose literature is very hardly 
dealt with. Why in prose may there not be much of 
that license in the fantastic, that measured riot, that 
right of whimsy, that unabashed dalliance with the 
extreme and beautiful, which the world allows by pre- 
scription to verse ? Why may not prose chase forest- 
nymphs, and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in 



214 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the stars, and roll 
mists about the hills, and watch the seas thundering 
through caverns and dashing against promontories ? 
Why, in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly on the 
one hand, or blush with shame at too much of the 
exquisite on the other? Is prose made of iron ? Must 
it never weep, never laugh, never linger to look at a 
buttercup, never ride at a gallop over the downs ? 
Always at a steady trot, transacting only such business 
as may be done within the limits of a soft sigh on the 
one hand and a thin smile on the other, must it leave 
all finer and higher work of imagination to the care 
of Verse ? Partly so, perhaps ; for prose soon becomes 
ashamed, and, when highly inspired, lifts itself into 
metre. Yet it is well for literature that there should 
be among us such prose-poets as Eichter was to the 
Germans : men avoiding nothing as too fantastic for 
their element, but free and daring in it as the verse- 
poet in his. All honour to Thackeray and the prose- 
fiction of social reality ; but let us not so theorize as to 
exclude from prose-fiction the boundless imagination of 
another Eichter, or even the ]awless zanyism of another 
Eabelais. 

Poetry, then, we must, after all, define in terms 
tantamount to those of Bacon. With Bacon himself 
we may define it vaguely as having reference to the 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 215 

imagination, " which faculty submitteth the shows of 

things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth 

buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." 

Or we may vary the phrase, and, with Coleridge, call it 

" the vision and faculty divine ; " or, with Leigh Hunt, ' 

" imaginative passion," the passion for " imaginative 

pleasure ; " or, with Mr. Dallas, more analytically, " the 

imaginative, harmonious, and unconscious activity of 

the soul." In any case, imagination is the main word, 

the main idea. Upon this Shakespeare himself has put 

his seal : 

u The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, 
Are of imagination all compact." 

In short, poesy is what the Greek language recognised 
it to be — TTOLTjcris, or creation. The antithesis, there- 
fore, is between Poetry and Science — 77-0/770-69 and 
vorjais. Let the universe of all accumulated exist- 
ence, inner and outer, material and mental, up to the 
present moment, lie under one like a sea, and there 
are two ways in which it may be intellectually dealt 
with and brooded over. On the one hand, the intel- 
lect of man may brood over it inquiringly, striving to 
penetrate it ■ through and through, to understand the 
system of law 7 s by which its multitudinous atoms are 
held together, to master the mystery of its pulsations 
and sequences. This is the mood of the man of 
science. On the other hand, the man of intellect may 



216 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

brood over it creatively, careless how it is held to- 
gether, or whether it is held together at all, and 
regarding it only as material to be submitted farther 
to the operation of a combining energy, and lashed and 
beaten up into new existences. This is the mood of 
the poet. The poet is emphatically the man who con- 
tinues the work of creation ; who forms, fashions, com- 
bines, imagines; who breathes his own spirit into 
things : who conditions the universe anew according 
to his whim and pleasure ; who bestows heads of brass 
on men when he likes, and sees beautiful women with 
arms of azure; who walks amid Nature's appear- 
ances, divorcing them, rematching them, interweaving 
them, starting at every step flocks of white-winged 
phantasies that fly and flutter into the ether of the 
future. 

All very well ; but, in plain English, what is meant 
by this imagination, this creative faculty, which is 
allowed by all to be the characteristic of the poet ? 
Mr. Dallas tells us that psychologists differ in their 
definitions of imagination. Dugald Stewart, and others, 
he says, have regarded it solely as the faculty which 
looks to the possible and unknown, which invents hip- 
pogriffs and the like ideal beasts — in short, the creative 
faculty proper. Mr. Dallas maintains that this is not 
sufficient, and that the faculty unphilosophically called 
Conception, the faculty which mirrors or reproduces the 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 217 



real, must also be included in the poetic imagination. 
And this is nearly all that he says on the subject. 

Now, if we were to venture on a closer definition, 
such as might be found applicable over the whole 
domain of poetry, we should perhaps affirm something 
to the following effect : — The poetic or imaginative 
faculty is the power of intellectually producing a new or 
artificial concrete; and the poetic genius or tempera- 
ment is that disposition of mind which leads habitually, 
or by preference, to this kind of intellectual exercise. 

There is much in this statement that might need 
explanation. In the first place, we would call attention 
to the words " intellectually producing," " intellectual 
exercise." These words are not needlessly inserted. 
It seems to us that the distinct recognition of what is 
implied in them would save a great deal of confusion. 
The phrases "poetic fire," "poetic passion," and the 
like, true and useful as they are on proper occasion, 
are calculated sometimes to mislead. There may be 
fire, there may be passion in the poet ; but that which 
is peculiar to the poet, that which constitutes the poetic 
tendency as such, is a special intellectual habit, distinct 
from the intellectual habit of the man of science. The 
poetic process may be set in operation by, and accom- 
panied by, any amount of passion or feeling; but 
the poetic process itself, so far as distinctions are of 
any value, is an intellectual process. Farther, as to its 



218 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

kind, it is the intellectual process of producing a new 
or artificial concrete. This distinguishes poetry at once, 
in all its varieties, and whether in verse or in prose, 
from the other forms of literature. In scientific or 
expository literature the tendency is to the abstract, 
to the translation of the facts and appearances of 
nature into general intellectual conceptions and forms 
of language. In oratorical literature, or the literature 
of moral stimulation, the aim is to urge the mind in 
a certain direction, or to induce upon it a certain state. 
There remains, distinct from either of these, the litera- 
ture of the concrete, the aim of which is to represent 
the facts and appearances of nature and life, or to form 
out of them new concrete combinations. There are men 
who delight in things simply because they have hap- 
pened, or because they can imagine them to happen: 
men, for example, to whom it is a real pleasure to 
know that at such and such a time a knight in armour 
rode along that way and across that bridge ; who dwell 
with relish on such a fact as that Sulla had a face 
mottled white and red, so that an Athenian wit com- 
pared it to a mulberry dipped in meal; who can go 
back to that moment, and re-arrest time there, as in a 
picture, when Manlius hung half-way from the top of 
the Tarpeian rock, and had his death of blood yet 
beneath him, or when Marie Antoinette lay under the 
axe and it had not fallen ; to whom also the mere em- 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 219 

bodiments of their own fancy or of the fancy of others 
are visions they never tire to gaze on. These are the 
votaries of the concrete. Now, so far as that literature of 
the concrete whose business it is to gratify such feelings 
deals merely with the actual facts of the past as delivered 
to it by memory, it resolves itself into the department 
of History; but, so far as it remains unexhausted by 
such a subduction, it is Poetry or Creative Literature. 
In practice, as we all know, the two shade into each 
other, the historian often requiring and displaying the 
imagination of the poet, and the poet, on the other hand, 
often relapsing into the describer and the historian. 
And here a part of our definition may be found fault 
with. Inasmuch as the poet does not necessarily, in 
every case, invent scenes and incidents totally ideal, 
but often treats poetically the actual fields and land- 
scapes of the earth and the real incidents of life — 
so that, in fact, much of our best and most genuine 
poetry is descriptive and historical — why define poesy 
to be the production of a new or artificial concrete ? 
Why not call it either the reproduction of an old or 
the production of a new concrete ? The objection is 
that the division which would be thus established is 
not fundamental. In every piece of poetry, even the 
most descriptive and historical, that which makes it 
poetical is not the concrete as furnished by sheer recol- 
lection, but the concrete as shaped and bodied forth 



220 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

anew by the poet's thought — that is, as factitious and 
artificial. Shelley, indeed, very sweetly calls poetry 
"the record of the best and happiest moments of the 
best and happiest minds ; " but then this only refers 
us farther back in time for the poetry, which certainly 
does not consist in the act of recording, if it be only 
recording, but already lay in the good and happy 
moments that are recorded. Thus, if it be said that the 
beautiful passage in Wordsworth describing a winter 
landscape, with the lake on which he skated with his 
companions in his boyhood, is a mere transcript of a 
scene from recollection, it may be replied that, if this 
is the case (which we do not admit), then the poetry of 
the passage was transacted along with the skating, and 
the critic, instead of watching the man at his writing- 
table, must keep by the side of the boy on the ice. In 
short, in every case whatever, poetry is the production 
of an artificial concrete — artificial either in toto, or in 
so far as it is matter of sense or memory worked 
into form by the infusion of a meaning. The word 
" artificial " has bad associations connected with it ; 
but, as Hazlitt said of Allegory, it is really a harmless 
word, and " won't bite you." It is only necessary to 
see what it means here to like it well enough. 

The poetical tendency, then, is the tendency to that 
kind of mental activity which consists in the produc- 
tion (one might almost say secretion) by the mind of 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 221 



an artificial concrete; and the poetic genius is that 
kind or condition of mind to which this kind of 
activity is constitutionally most delightful and easy. 
Of the legitimacy of such a mode of activity what 
need to say anything? With some theorists, indeed, 
poets are little better than privileged liars, and poetry 
is little better than the art of lying so as to give plea- 
sure. Even Bacon, with his synonyms of " feigned 
history " and the like, evidently means to insinuate a 
kind of contempt for poetry as compared with philo- 
sophy. The one he calls ■' the theatre," where it is not 
good to stay long ; the other is the "judicial place or 
palace of the mind." This is natural enough in a man 
the tenor of whose own intellectual work must have 
inclined him, apart even from the original constitu- 
tional bias which determined that, to prefer the 
exercise which " buckled and bowed the mind to the 
nature of things " to the exercise which " elevates 
the mind by submitting the shows of things to its 
desires." But recognising, as he did, that the one 
exercise is, equally with the other, the exercise of a 
faculty which is part and parcel of the human con- 
stitution, he was not the man to go very far with the 
joke about poets being a species of liars. That, we 
believe, was Bentham's fun. One can see what a good 
thing might be made of it. "Why was that poor 
fellow transported ? Why, the fact is, at last assizes, 



222 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

he originated a piece of new concrete, which the law 
calls perjury." But the joke may be taken by the other 
end. When that deity of the Grecian mythology (if the 
Grecian mythology had such a deity) whose function 
it was to create trees, walked one sultry day over the 
yet treeless earth, and when, chancing to lie down 
in a green spot, the creative phrenzy came upon him, 
his thought rushed forth, and, with a whirr of earthy 
atoms all round and a tearing of turf, the first of oaks 
sprang up completed, that also was the origination of 
a new piece of concrete, but one could hardly say that 
it was telling a lie. Had his godship been a philo- 
sopher instead of a poet, had he buckled and bowed 
his mind to the nature of things instead of accom- 
modating the shows of things to his desires, the world 
might have been without oaks to this very day. 

Poetical activity being denned generally to be that 
kind of intellectual activity which results in the pro- 
duction of new matter of the concrete, it follows that 
there are as many varieties in the exercise of this 
activity as there are possible forms of an intellectual 
concrete. To attempt a complete enumeration of the 
various ways in which imaginative activity may show 
itself would be tedious ; but an instance or two may 
bring some of the more common of them before the 
mind. 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 223 

" The sun had just sunk below the tops of the moun- 
tains, whose long shadows stretched athwart the valley ; 
but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of 
the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of 
the forest that hung upon the opposite steeps, and 
streamed in full splendour upon the towers and battle- 
ments of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts 
along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour 
of these illuminated objects was heightened by the con- 
trasted shade which involved the valley below." 

Mrs. Eadcliffe. 
" Almost at the root 
Of that tall pine, the shadow of whose bare 
And slender stem, while here I sit at eve, 
Oft stretches towards me, like a long straight path, 
Traced faintly on the greensward — there, beneath 
A plain blue stone, a gentle dalesman lies." 

WORDS WORTH. 

These are plain instances of that kind of imaginative 
exercise which consists in the imagination of scenes or 
objects. A large proportion of the imaginative activity 
of men generally, and of authors in particular, is of 
this kind. It includes pictures and descriptions of all 
varieties, from the most literal reproductions of the 
real, whether in country or town, to the most absolute 
phantasies in form and colour, and from the scale of a 
single object, such as the moon or a bank of violets, 
to the scale of a Wordsworthian landscape, or of a 
Milton's universe with its orbs and interspaces. It 
may be called descriptive imagination. 



224 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

<l And Priam then alighted from his chariot, 
Leaving Idseus with it, who remained 
Holding the mules and horses ; and the old man 
Went straight in-doors, where the beloved of Jove, 
Achilles sat, and found him. In the room 
Were others, but apart; and two alone — 
The hero Automedon and Alcinous, 
A branch of Mars — stood by him. They had been 
At meals, and had not yet removed the board. 
Great Priam came, without their seeing him, 
And, kneeling down, he clasped Achilles' knees, 
And kissed those terrible homicidal hands 
Which had deprived him of so many sons." 

Homer. 

This is the imagination of incident, or narrative imagi- 
nation. The instance is plain even to baldness ; it is 
direct Homeric narration : but for this very reason, it 
will better stand as a type of that department of 
imaginative activity to which it belongs. In this 
department are included all narrations of incidents, 
whether historical and real, or fictitious and super- 
natural, from the scale of a single incident as told 
in a ballad, up to the sustained unity of the epos or 
drama, as in Crusoe, Don Quixote, the Iliad, the Divine 
Comedy, the Faery Queene, Macheth, or Paradise Lost. 
It is hardly necessary to point out that the narration 
of incident always involves a certain amount of de- 
scription of scenery. 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 225 

" The Reve was a slender colerike man, 
His beard was a shave as nigh as ever he can, 
His hair was by his eares round yshorn, 
His top was docked like a priest beforne. 
Full longe were his legges and full lean, 
Ylike a staff; there was no calf yseen." 

Chaucer. 

This may stand as a specimen of what is in reality a 
sub-variety of the imaginative exercise first mentioned, 
but is important enough to be adverted to apart. It 
may be called the imagination of physiognomy and 
costume ; under which head might be collected an im- 
mense number of passages from all quarters of our 
literature. This department, too, will include both the 
real and ideal — the real^ as in Chaucer's and Scott's 
portraits of men and women ; the ideal, as in Spenser's 
personifications, in Ariosto's hippogriff, or in Dante's 
Nimrod in a pit in hell, with his face as large as the 
dome of St. Peter's, and his body in proportion, blow- 
ing a horn, and yelling gibberish. 

Connected with this in practice, but distinguishable 
from it, is another variety of imaginative exercise, 
which may be called the imagination of states of feel- 
ing. Here is an example : — 

" A fig for those by law protected ! 
Liberty 's a glorious feast ; 
Courts for cowards were erected ; 
Churches built to please the priest." 

Burns's Jolly Beggars. 

Q 



22(> THEORIES OF POETRY. 

This stanza, it will be observed (and we have chosen it 
on purpose), is, in itself, as little poetical as may be ; it 
is mere harsh Chartist prose. But, in so far as it is an 
imagined piece of concrete — that is, in so far as it is 
an imagination by the poet of the state of feeling of 
another mind, or of his own mind in certain circum- 
stances — it is poetical. This is an important con- 
sideration, for it links the poet not only with what 
is poetical in itself, but with a whole, much larger, 
world of what is unpoetical in itself. The poet may 
imagine opinions, doctrines, heresies, cogitations, de- 
bates, expositions ; there is no limit to his traffic with 
the moral any more than with the sensuous appear- 
ances of the universe : only, as a poet, he deals with 
all these as concrete things, existing in the objective 
air, and from which his own mind stands disentangled, 
as a spade stands loose from the sand it digs, whether 
sand of gold or sand of silex. The moment any of the 
doctrines he is dealing with melts into his own per- 
sonal state of being (which is happening continually), 
at that moment the poet ceases to be a poet pure, and 
becomes so far a thinker or moralist in union with the 
poet. As regards the literary rauge of this kind of 
imaginative exercise, — the imagination ' of states of 
feeling, — it is only necessary to remember what a 
large proportion it includes of our lyric poetry, and 
how far it extends into the epic and the drama, where 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 22: 



(and especially in the drama) it forms, together with 
the imagination of physiognomy and costume, the 
greater part of what is called invention of character. 

The foregoing is but a slight enumeration of some of 
the various modes of imaginative exercise as they are 
popularly distinguishable ; and, in transferring them 
into creative literature at large, they must be con- 
ceived as incessantly interblended, and as existing in 
all varieties and degrees of association with personal 
thought, personal purpose, and personal calm or storm 
of feeling. It is matter of common observation, how- 
ever, that some writers excel more in one and some 
more in another of the kinds of imagination enume- 
rated. One writer is said to excel in descriptions, but 
to be deficient in plot and incident; nay, to excel in 
that kind of description which consists in the imagina- 
tion of form, but to be deficient in that which consists 
in the imagination of colour. Another is said to excel 
in plot, but to be poor in the invention of character, 
and in other particulars. In short, the imagination, 
though in one sense it acts loose and apart from the 
personality, flying freely round and round it, like a sea- 
bird round a rock, seems, in a deeper sense, restricted 
by the same law as the personality in its choice and 
apprehension of the concrete. The organ of ideality, as 
the phrenologist would say, is the organ by which man 
freely bodies forth an ideal objective ; and yet, were 

Q 2 



228 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

ideality never so large in a man's head, it would be of 
no use to apply it, after Keats or Milton, in the direc- 
tion of white pinks, pansies freaked with jet, sapphire 
battlements, and crimson-lipped shells, unless there 
were also a little knot on the eyebrow over the organ 
of colour. 

The poetical tendency of the human mind being this 
tendency to the ideal concrete, to the imagination of 
scenes, incidents, physiognomies, states of feeling, and 
so on — and all men having more or less of this ten- 
dency, catering for them in the ideal concrete, very 
much in the same way as their senses cater for them 
in the real (so that the imagination of a man might 
be said to be nothing more than the ghosts of his 
senses wandering in an unseen world) — it follows that 
the poet, par excellence, is simply the man whose intel- 
lectual activity is consumed in this kind of exercise. 
All men have imagination ; but the poet is " of imagi- 
nation all compact." He lives and moves in the ideal 
concrete. He teems with imaginations of forms, 
colours, incidents, physiognomies, feelings, and charac- 
ters. The ghosts of his senses are as busy in an 
unseen world of sky, sea, vegetation, cities, highways, 
thronged markets of men, and mysterious beings be- 
longing even to the horizon of that existence, as his 
real senses are with all the nearer world of nature and. 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 229 



life. But the notable peculiarity lies in this, that 
every thought of his in the interest of this world is 
an excursion into that. In this respect, the theory 
which has been applied to the exposition of the Grecian 
mythology applies equally to poetic genius in general. 
The essence of the mythical process, it is said, lay 
in this, that, the earlier children of the earth having 
no abstract language, every thought of theirs, of what- 
ever kind, and about whatever matter, was necessarily 
a new act of imagination, a new excursion in the ideal 
concrete. If they thought of the wind, they did not 
think of a fluid rushing about, but of a deity blowing 
from a cave ; if they thought of virtue rewarded, they 
saw the idea in the shape of a visible transaction, 
in some lone place, between beings human and divine. 
And so with the poetical mode of thought to this day. 
Every thought of the poet, about whatever subject, 
is transacted not mainly in propositional language, 
but for the most part in a kind of phantasmagoric or 
representative language, of imaginary scenes, objects, 
incidents, and circumstances. To clothe his feelings 
with circumstance; to weave forth whatever arises 
in his mind into an objective tissue of imagery and 
incident that shall substantiate it and make it visible : 
such is the constant aim and art of the poet. Take 
an example. The idea of life occurs to the poet 
Keats, and how does he express it ? 



230 THEORIES OF POETRY. 



" Stop and consider ! Life is but a day ; 
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way 
From a tree's summit ; a poor Indian's sleep, 
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep 
Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan ? 
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown ; 
The reading of an ever-changing tale ; 
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil ; 
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air ; 
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, 
Eiding the springy branches of an elm." 

This is true irol^a-u^. What with the power of innate 
analogy, what with the occult suasion of the rhyme, 
there arose first in the poet's mind, contemporaneous 
with the idea of life, nay, as incorporate with that 
idea, the imaginary object or vision of the dew-drop 
falling through foliage. That imagined circumstance 
is, therefore, flung forth as representative of the idea. 
But even this does not exhaust the creative force. The 
idea bodies itself again in the new imaginary circum- 
stance of the Indian in his boat ; and that, too, is flung 
forth. Then there is a rest. But the idea still buds, 
still seeks to express itself in new circumstance; and 
five other translations of it follow. And these seven 
pictures, these seven morsels of imagined concrete, 
if we suppose them all to be intellectually genuine, 
aie as truly the poet's thoughts about life as any seven 
scientific definitions would be the thoughts of the 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 231 

physiologist or the metaphysician. And so in other 
instances. Tennyson's Vision of Sin is a continued 
phantasmagory of scene and incident representative of a 
meaning ; and, if the meaning is not plain throughout 
it is because it would be impossible for the poet him- 
self to translate every portion of it out of that language 
of phantasmagory in which alone it came into exist- 
ence. Again, Spenser's personifications — his grim-hued 
Horror soaring on iron wings, his Jealousy seated apart 
and biting his lips, and the rest — are all thoughts 
expressed in circumstance, the circumstance in this 
case being that of costume and physiognomy. In 
short, every thought of the poet is an imagination of 
concrete circumstance of some kind or other— circum- 
stance of visual scenery, of incident, of physiognomy, 
of feeling, or of character. The poet's thought, let 
the subject be what it may, brings him to 

" Visions of all places : a bowery nook 
Will be elysium — an eternal book 
Whence he may copy many a lovely saying 1 
About the leaves and flowers — about the playing 
Of nymphs in woods and fountains, and the shade 
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid ; 
And many a verse from so strange influence 
That we must ever wonder how and whence 
It came." 

Regarding the poet, then, considered in his nature, 
we may sum up by saying that the act of cogitation 



232 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

with him is nothing else than the intellectual secretion 
of fictitious circumstance — the nature of the circum- 
stance in each case depending on the operation of 
those mysterious affinities which relate thought to the 
world of sense. In regarding the poet more expressly 
as a literary artist, all that we have to do is to 
vary the phrase, and say — the intellectual invention 
of fictitious circumstance. This will apply to all that 
is truly poetical in literature, whether on the large 
scale or on the small. In every case what is poetical 
in literature consists of the embodiment of some notion 
or feeling, or some aggregate of notions and feelings, in 
appropriate imagined circumstances. Thus, in historical 
or biographical writing, the poetic faculty is shown by 
the skill, sometimes conscious and sometimes uncon- 
scious, with which the figures are not only portrayed 
in themselves, but set against imagined visible back- 
grounds, and made to move amid circumstances having 
a pre-arranged harmony with what they do. The 
achievement of this, in consistency with the truth of 
record, is the triumph of the descriptive historian. In 
fictitious prose-narrative the same poetic art has still 
freer scope. That a lover should be leaning over a stile 
at one moment, and sitting under a tree at another; 
that it should be clear, pure moonlight when Henry 
is happy, and that the moon should be bowling through 
clouds, and a dog be heard howling at a farmhouse 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 233 

near, when the same Henry means to commit suicide — 
are artifices of which every ordinary novelist is master 
who knows his trade. The giant Grangousier, in Babe- 
lais, sitting by the fire, very intent upon the broiling of 
some chestnuts, drawing scratches on the hearth with 
the end of a burnt stick, and telling to his wife and 
children pleasant stories of the days of old, is an in- 
stance of a higher kind, paralleled by many in Scott 
and Cervantes. And, then, in the epic and the 
drama ! Hamlet with the skull in his hand, and 
Homer's heroes walking by the tto\v<J)\oi(t/3oio ! It is 
the same throughout the whole literature of fiction : 
always thought expressed and thrown off in the lan- 
guage of representative circumstance. Indeed, Goethe's 
theory of poetical or creative literature was that it is 
nothing else than the moods of its practitioners objec- 
tivized as they rise. XA man feels himself oppressed 
and agitated by feelings and longings, now of one kind, 
now of another, that have gathered upon him till they 
have assumed the form of definite moral uneasiness. 
If he is not a literary man, he contrives to work off the 
burden, in some way or other, by the ordinary activity 
of life — which, indeed, is the great preventive esta- 
blished by nature; but, if he is a literary man, then 
the uneasiness is but the motive to creation, and the 
result is a song, a drama, an epic, or a novel. Scheming 
oat some plan or story, which is in itself a kind of 



234 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

allegory of his mood as a whole, he fills up the sketch 
with minor incidents, scenes, and characters, which are 
nothing more than the breaking up of the mood into 
its minutiae, and the elaboration of these minutiae, one 
by one, into the concrete. This done, the mood has 
passed into the objective ; it may be looked at as some- 
thing external to the mind, which is therefore from 
that moment rid of it, and ready for another. Such, 
at least, was Goethe's theory; which, he said, would 
apply most rigidly to all that he had himself written. 
Nor would it be difficult, with due explanation, to 
apply the theory to the works of all other masters of 
creative or poetical literature. Dante may be said to 
have slowly translated his whole life into one repre- 
sentative performance. 

Several supplementary considerations must be now 
adduced. The form of the poet's cogitation, we have 
said, is the evolution not of abstract propositions but of 
representative concrete circumstances. But in this, too, 
there may be degrees of better and worse, of greater 
and less. Precisely as, of two writers thinking in the 
language of abstract speculation, we can say, without 
hesitation, which has the more powerful mind, so of 
two writers thinking in the other language of concrete 
circumstance, one may be evidently superior to the 
other. There is room, in short, for all varieties of 
greater and less among poets as among other people. 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 235 

Hence the folly of the attempts to exalt poetical 
genius, merely as such, above other kinds of intel- 
lectual manifestation. A man may be constitutionally 
formed so that he thinks his thoughts in the language 
of concrete circumstance ; and still his thoughts may 
be very little thoughts, hardly worth having in any 
language. Both poets and men of science must be 
tried among their peers. Whether there is a common 
measure, and what it is ; whether there is an intrinsic 
superiority in the mode of cogitation of the poet over 
that of the philosopher, or the reverse ; and whether and 
how far we may then institute a comparison of absolute 
greatness between Aristotle and Homer, between Milton 
and Kant : these are questions of a high calculus, 
which most men may leave alone. There is no diffi- 
culty, however, when the question is between a Kirke 
White and a Kant ; and when a poor poet, never so 
genuine in a small way, tells people that his intellect 
is " genius," while theirs is " talent," he runs a risk of 
being very unceremoniously treated. 

" This palace standeth in the air, 
By necromancy placed there, 
That it no tempest needs to fear, 

Which way soe'er it blow it : 
And somewhat southward toward the noon 
There lies a way up to the moon, 
And thence the fairy can as soon 

Pass to the Earth below it." 



236 THEORIES OF POETRY. 



This is very sweet, and nice, and poetical (it is by 
Drayton, not a small poet, but a considerable one) ; 
and yet surely, call it genius or what you will, there 
was less commotion of the elements when it was 
produced than when Newton excogitated one of his 
physical theories. 

We may pass to another point. The imagination 
following the law of the personality, some imaginations 
are strong where others are weak, and weak where 
others are strong. In other words, though all poets, 
as such, express themselves in the language of concrete 
circumstance, some are greater adepts in one kind 
of circumstance, others in another. Some are great in 
the circumstance of form, which is the sculptor's 
favourite circumstance ; others can produce admirable 
compositions in chiaroscuro ; others have the whole rain- 
bow on their pallet. And so, some express themselves 
better in incident, others better in physiognomy and 
character. All this is recognised in daily criticism. 
Now, the consequence of the diversity is that it is very 
difficult to compare poets even amongst themselves. 
It is not every poet that exhibits an imagination 
absolutely universal, using with equal ease the lan- 
guage of form, of colour, of character, and of incident. 
Shakespeare himself, if we may infer anything from his 
minor poems, and from the carelessness with which he 
took ready-made plots for his dramas from any quarter, 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 237 

was not so great a master of incident as of other kinds 
of circumstance, and could hardly have rivalled Homer, 
or Scott, purely as a narrative poet. How, then, 
establish a comparative measure, assigning a relative 
value to each kind of circumstance ? How balance 
what Chaucer has and has not against what Milton 
has and has not — Chaucer, so skilful in physiognomy, 
against Milton, who has so little of it, but who 
has so much else ; or how estimate the chiaroscuro 
of Byron as against the richly coloured vegetation of 
Keats ? Here, too, a scientific rule is undiscoverable, 
and a judgment is only possible in very decided cases, 
or by the peremptory verdict of private taste. ^ 

" Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the 
mellow shade, 
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver 
braid." 

Who will venture to institute a sure comparison of 
merit between this exquisite bit of colour from Tenny- 
son and the following simple narrative lines from the 
same poet ? 

* All the man was broken with remorse ; 
And all his love came back a hundredfold ; 
And for three hours he sobbed o'er William's child, 
Thinking of William." 

There is yet a third thing that has to be taken into 
consideration. Be a man as truly a poet as it is 



238 THEORIES OF FOE TRY. 

possible to be, and be the kind of circumstance in 
which his imagination excels as accurately known as 
possible, it is not always that he can do his best. The 
poet, like other men, is subject to inequalities of mood 
and feeling. Now he is excited and perturbed, because 
the occasion is one to rouse his being from its depths ; 
now he is placid, calm, and commonplace. Hence 
variations in the interest of the poetical efforts of one 
and the same poet. As he cannot choose but think 
poetically, whether roused or not, even the leisurely 
babble of his poorest hours, if he chooses to put it 
forth, will be poetical. But he is not to be measured 
by this, any more than the philosopher by his casual 
trifles, or the orator by his speeches on questions that 
are insignificant. It is even important to remark that 
it is only at a certain pitch of feeling that some men 
become poets. Though the essence of poetry consists in 
a particular mode of intellectual exercise, yet the emo- 
tional moment at which different minds adopt this 
mode of exercise may not be the same. The language 
of concrete circumstance is natural to all men when 
they are very highly excited : all joy, all sorrow, all 
rage, expresses itself in imaginations. The question 
then not unfrequently ought to be : At what level of 
feeling does a man become or profess to be a poet ? 
On this may depend, not the verdict as to the genuine- 
ness of his poetry, but the disposition to spare time to 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 239 

listen to it. The most assiduous members of Parlia- 
ment do not feel bound to be in the House, even when 
a leader is speaking, unless it is on a Cabinet question 
or a question of some considerable interest. Some 
orators know this and reserve themselves ; others, de- 
lighting in their profession, speak on every question. 
It is the same with poets, and with the same result. 
A Keats, though always poetical, may often be poetical 
with so small a stimulus that only lovers of poetry for 
its own sake feel themselves sufficiently interested. 
Why are Milton's minor poems, exquisite as they are, 
not cited as measures of his genius ? Because they are 
not his speeches on Cabinet questions. Why is Spenser 
the favourite poet of poets, rather than a popular 
favourite like Byron ? For the same reason that a 
court of law is crowded during a trial for life or death, 
but attended only by barristers during the trial of an 
intricate civil case. The subject chosen by a poetical 
writer is a kind of allegory of the whole state of his 
mental being at the moment; but some writers are 
not moved to allegorize so easily as others, and it is 
a question with readers what states of mind they care 
most to see allegorized. This, then, is to be taken into 
account, in comparing poet with poet. Precisely as an 
orator is remembered by his speeches on great ques- 
tions, and as the position of a painter among painters 
is determined in part by the interest of his subjects, so 



240 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

in a comparison of poets, or of the same poet with 
himself, the seriousness of the occasion always goes 
for something. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, though 
fine as a poetical study, does not affect one with the 
same human interest as his plays; and there is a 
gradation of interest in advancing from leisurely com- 
positions of the sweet sensuous order, such as Keats's 
Endymion and Spenser's Faery Queene, to the severe 
splendour of a Divina Commedia or a Prometheus 
Vinctus. True, on the one hand, poets choose their 
own subjects, so that these themselves are to be taken 
into the estimate ; and, on the other, the very practice 
of the art of poetical expression on any subject, like 
the glow of the orator when he begins to speak, leads 
into unexpected regions. Yet, after all, in weighing a 
poem against others, this consideration of the emotional 
level at which it was produced, and of its interest in 
connexion with the general work and sentiment of the 
world, is a cause of much perplexity. 

" Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly, 
Most musical, most melancholy ! 
Thee, chantress, oft the woods among 
I woo, to hear thy even-song ; 
And, missing thee, I walk unseen 
On the dry, smooth- shaven green, 
To behold the wandering moon 
Riding near her highest noon, 
Like one that hath been led astray 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 241 

Through the heaven's wide pathless way, 
And oft, as if her head she bowed, 
Stooping through a fleecy cloud. 
Oft, on a plat of rising ground, 
I hear the far-off curfew sound, 
Over some wide-watered shore, 
Swinging slow with sullen roar." 

How decide between this from Milton's Penseroso and 
this, in so different a key, from Shakespeare's Lear ? — 

" Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow ! 
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout 
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the 

cocks ! 
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, 
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, 
Singe my white head ! and thou, all-shaking thunder, 
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world." 

A fourth consideration, which intrudes itself into the 
question of our appreciation of actual poetry, and which 
is not sufficiently borne in mind, is that in almost 
every poem there is much present besides the pure 
poetry. Poetry, as such, is cogitation in the language of 
concrete circumstance. Some poets excel constitution- 
ally in one kind of circumstance, some in another ; some 
are moved to this mode of cogitation on a less, others 
on a greater, emotional occasion; but, over and above 
all this, it is to be noted that no poet always and 
invariably cogitates in the poetical manner. Specu- 



242 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

lation, information, mental produce and mental activity 
of all kinds, may be exhibited in the course of a work 
which is properly called a poem, on account of its 
general character; and, as men are liable to be im- 
pressed by greatness in every form wherever they 
meet it, all that is thus precious in the extra-poetical 
contents of a poem is included in the estimate of 
the greatness of the poet. One example will suffice. 
Shakespeare is as astonishing for the exuberance of 
his genius in abstract notions, and for the depth of 
his analytic and philosophic insight, as for the scope 
and minuteness of his poetic imagination. It is as if 
into a mind poetical in form there had been poured all 
the matter that existed in the mind of his contem- 
porary Bacon. In Shakespeare's plays we have thought, 
history, exposition, and philosophy, all within the 
round of the poet. The only difference between him 
and Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay 
and calls it his own, while Shakespeare writes a 
similar essay and puts it into the mouth of a Ulysses 
or a Polonius. It is only this fiction of a speaker 
and an audience that retains many of Shakespeare's 
noblest passages within the pale of strict poetry. 

Hitherto we have made no formal distinction be- 
tween the poet, specifically so called, and the general 
practitioners of creative literature, of whatever variety. 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 243 

Our examples, indeed, have been taken in the main 
from those whom the world recognises as poets ; but, 
as far as our remarks have gone, poetry still stands 
synonymous with the whole literature of imagination. 
All who express their meaning by the literary repre- 
sentation of scenes, incidents, physiognomies, and cha- 
racters, whether suggested by the real world or wholly 
imaginary, are poets. All who, doing this, do it 
grandly, and manifest a rich and powerful nature, are 
great poets. Those who excel more in the language of 
one kind of circumstance are poets more especially 
of that kind of circumstance — poets of visual scenery, 
poets of incident and narration, poets of physiognomy, 
or poets of character and sentiment, as the case may be. 
Those who are poetical only at a high key, and in the 
contemplation of themes of large human interest, are 
the poets who take the deepest hold on the memory of 
the human race. Finally, those who, having the largest 
amount of poetic genius, and of the best kind, associate 
therewith the most extensive array of other intellectual 
qualities, are the poets of the strongest momentum and 
the greatest universal chance. 

Not a word in all this to exclude imaginative prose- 
writers. So far, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Aristophanes, 
Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Cervantes, Spenser, 
Shakespeare, Milton, Tasso, Moliere, Goethe, Eichter, 
Scott, Defoe, and a host of others, are all huddled to- 
il 2 



244 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

gether, the principal figures of a great crowd, including 
alike poets and prose-writers. These indeed may, in 
accordance with considerations already suggested, be 
distributed into groups, and that either by reference to 
degree or by reference to kind. But no considerations 
have yet been adduced that would separate the ima- 
ginative prose-writers, as such, from the imaginative 
verse-writers, as such. Now, though this is good pro- 
visionally — though it is well to keep together for a 
while in the same field of view all writers of imagina- 
tion, whether bards or prose-writers — yet the universal 
instinct, not to say the prejudice of association and 
custom, demands that the poets, as a brotherhood, shall 
be more accurately defined. How, then, lead out the 
poets, in the supreme sense, from the general throng 
where they yet stand waiting ? By what device call 
the poets by themselves into the foreground, and leave 
the prose-writers behind ? By a union of two devices ! 
Go in front of the general crowd, you two : you, flag- 
bearer, with your richly-painted flag, and you, fluter, 
with your silver flute ! Flap the flag, and let them 
see it ; sound the flute, and let them hear ! Lo ! 
already the crowd w T avers : it sways to and fro ; 
some figures seem to be pressing forward from the 
midst ; and at last one silver-headed old serjeant steps 
out in front of all, and begins to march to the sound of 
the flute. Who is it but old Homer ? He is blind 



THEORIES OF FOETE Y. 245 

and cannot see the flag ; but he knows it is there, and 
the flute guides him. Others and others follow the 
patriarch, some looking to the flag, and others listening 
to the flute, but all marching in one direction. Shake- 
speare comes with the rest, stepping lightly, as if but 
half in earnest. And thus at last, lured by the flag and 
by the flute, all the poets are brought out into the fore- 
ground. The flag is Imagery; the flute is Verse. In 
other words, poets proper are distinguished from the 
general crowd of imaginative writers by a peculiar rich- 
ness of language, which is called imagery, and by the 
use, along with that language, of a measured arrange- 
ment of words known as verse. 

It is, as Mr. Dallas observes, a disputed point whether 
Imagery or Verse is to be regarded as the more essential 
element of poetry. It has been usual, of late, to give 
the palm to imagery. Thus, it was a remark of Lord 
Jeffrey — and the remark has almost passed into a pro- 
verb — that a want of relish for such rich sensuous poetry 
as that of Keats would argue a want of true poetical 
taste. The same would probably be said of Spenser. 
Mr. Dallas, on the other hand, thinks Verse more 
essential than Imagery, and in this Leigh Hunt 
would probably agree with him. The importance 
attached to a sensuous richness of language as part 
of poetry is, Mr. Dallas thinks, too great at present ; 
and in opposition to Lord Jeffrey, or at least by way of 



246 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

corrective to his remark about Keats, he proposes that 
a power of appreciating such severe literary beauty as 
that of Sophocles shall, more than anything else, be 
reckoned to the credit of a man's poetical taste. Mr. 
Dallas, on the whole, is in the right ; and this will 
appear more clearly if we consider what Imagery and 
Verse respectively are, in relation to poetry. 

Imagery in poetry is secondary concrete adduced by 
the imagination in the expression of prior concrete. 
Thus, in the simile, — 

" The superior Fiend 
Was moving toward the shore, his ponderous shield. 
Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, 
Behind him cast : the broad circumference 
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb 
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views 
At evening from the top of Fesole." 

Here the primary object in the imagination of the 
poet is Satan with his shield hung on his shoulders. 
While imagining this, however, the poet strikes upon 
a totally distinct visual appearance, that of the moon 
seen through a telescope, and his imagination, en- 
amoured with the likeness, imparts the new picture to 
the reader as something additional to the first. Again, 
take the metajrfwr : — 

" Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
Wept at completing of the mortal sin 
Original." 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 247 

Here the process is the same as in the simile, but more 
unconscious and complete. The concrete object first in 
the mind (so far at least as these lines are concerned) 
is the sky dropping rain : in the imagination of this 
another imagined object, that of a being shedding 
tears, intrudes itself; the two objects are combined by a 
kind of identifying flash ; and the double concrete is 
presented to the reader. So, again, with that highest 
species of metaphor, the personification or vivification, 
of which, indeed, the metaphor quoted is an ex- 
ample. 

Almost all so-called images may be reduced under 
one or other of the foregoing heads ; and, in any case, 
all imagery will be found to consist in the use of con- 
crete to help out concrete. Now, as the very essence of 
the poet consists in the incessant imagination of con- 
crete circumstance, a language rich in imagery is in 
itself a proof of the possession of poetical faculty in a 
high degree. Cceteris paribus, the more of subsidiary 
circumstance evolved in intellectual connexion with the 
main one the higher the evidence of poetical power. 
There is a likeness, in this respect, between poetical and 
scientific writers. Some scientific writers, e.g. Locke, 
attend so rigorously to the main thought they are 
pursuing as to give their style a kind of nakedness and 
iron straightness ; others, e.g. Bacon, without being 
indifferent to the main thought, are so full of intel- 



248 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

lectual matter of all kinds that they enrich every 
sentence with a detritus of smaller propositions related 
to the one immediately on hand. So with poets. 
Some poets — as Keats, Shakespeare, and Milton in 
much of his poetry — so teem with concrete circum- 
stance, or generate it so fast, as their imagination works, 
that every imagined circumstance as it is put forth 
from them takes with it an accompaniment of parasitic 
fancies. Others, as the Greek dramatists and Dante, 
sculpture their thoughts massively in severe outline. 
It seems probable that the tendency to excess of im- 
agery is natural to the Gothic or Eomantic as distinct 
from the Hellenic or Classical imagination; but it is 
not unlikely that the fact that poetry is now read 
instead of being merely heard, as it once was, has 
something to do with it. As regards the question 
when imagery is excessive, when the richness of a poet's 
language is to be called extravagance, no general prin- 
ciple can be laid down. The judgment on this point 
in each case must depend on the particular state of 
the case. A useful distinction, under this head, might 
possibly be drawn between the liberty of the poet and 
the duty of the artist. Keats's Endymion one might 
safely, with reference to such a distinction, pronounce 
to be too rich ; for in that poem there is no proportion 
between the imagery, or accessory concrete, and the 
main stem of the imagined circumstance from which 



THEORIES OF FOETBY. 249 

the poem derives its name. In the Eve of St. Agnes, 
on the other hand, there is no such fault. 

Of Verse, as connected with poetry, various theories 
have been given./ Wordsworth, whose theory is always 
more narrow than his practice, makes the rationale of 
verse to consist in this, that it provides for the mind a 
succession of minute pleasurable surprises in addition 
to the mere pleasure communicated by the meaning. 
Others regard it as a voluntary homage of the mind 
to law as law, repaid by the usual rewards of dis- 
interested obedience. Mr. Dallas sets these and other 
theories aside, and puts the matter on its right basis. 
Verse is an artificial source of pleasure ; it is an incen- 
tive to attention, or a device for economizing attention ; 
and it is an act of obedience to law, if you choose so to 
regard it. All these, however, are merely statements 
respecting verse as something already found out and 
existing ; not one of them is a theory of verse in its 
origin and nature. Such a theory, if it is to be sought 
for at all, must clearly consist in the assertion of this, 
as a fundamental fact of nature — that, when the mind 
of man is either excited to a certain pitch, or engaged 
in a certain kind of exercise, its actions adjust them- 
selves, in a more express manner than usual, to time as 
meted out in beats or intervals. Mr. Dallas, giving to 
the statement its most transcendental form, says that 
the rationale of metre is to be deduced from the fact 



250 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

that, inasmuch as Time, according to Kant, is but a 
leading form of Sense, it must fall under the law of 
Imagination, the faculty representative of Sense. Quite 
independent of this philosophic generalization, which it 
would at least require much time to work down to the 
ordinary apprehension, there are many facts, some of 
w T hich Mr. Dallas very acutely points out, all tending 
to indicate the existence of such a law as we have 
described. The swinging of a student to and fro in his 
chair during a fit of meditation, the oratorical see-saw, 
the evident connexion of mental states with the breath- 
ings and the pulse-beats, the power of the tick-tick of a 
clock to induce reverie, and of the clink-clank of a bell 
to make the fool think words to it, are all instances 
of the existence of such a law. iSTay, the beginnings 
of poetical metre itself are to be traced in speech far 
on this side of what is accounted poetry. There is a 
visible tendency to metre in every articulate expres- 
sion of strong feeling ; and the ancient Greeks, we are 
told, used to amuse themselves with scanning passages 
in the speeches of their great orators. 

Without trying to investigate this question farther, 
we would refer to a consideration connected with it 
which seems important for our present purpose. The 
law, as stated hypothetically, is that the mind, either 
when excited to a certain pitch, or when engaged in a 
particular kind of exercise, takes on a marked con- 



THEORIES OF POETRY, 251 

cordance with time as measured by beats. Now, 
whether is it the first or the second mental con- 
dition that necessitates this concordance ? Poetry 
we have all along defined as a special mode of 
intellectual exercise, possible under all degrees of 
emotional excitement — the exercise of the mind ima- 
ginatively, or in the figuring forth of concrete circum- 
stance. Is it, then, poetry as such that requires metre, 
or only poetry by virtue of the emotion with which 
it is in general accompanied — that emotion either 
preceding and stimulating the imaginative action, or 
being generated by it, as heat is evolved by friction ? 
The question is not an easy one. On the whole, how- 
ever, one might incline to the belief that, though poetry 
and passion have metre for their common servant, it is 
on passion, and not on poetry, that metre holds by 
original tenure. Is not metre found in its highest and 
most decided form in lyrical poetr}^, narrative poetry 
having less, and dramatic poetry still less of it? and 
wherever, in the course of a poem, there is an unusual 
metrical boom, is not the passage so characterized 
always found to be one not so much of pure concrete 
richness as of strong accompanying passion? What, 
then, if song, instead of being, as common language 
makes it, the complete and developed form of poetry, 
should have to be scientifically defined as the complete 
and developed form of oratory, passing into poetry only 



252 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

in as far as passion, in its utterance, always seizes and 
whirls with it shreds and atoms of imagined circum- 
stance 1 If this is the true theory, Yerse belongs, by 
historical origin, to Oratory, and lingers with Poetry 
only as an entailed inheritance. 

Prose, then, may, as we have said, make inroads upon 
that region of the literature of the concrete which has 
hitherto been under the dominion of verse. But, on the 
other hand, verse, whatever it may have been in its origin, 
exists now, like many other sovereignties, by right of 
expediency, constitutional guarantee, and the voluntary 
submission of those who are its subjects. And here 
it is that the theories of Wordsworth and others have 
their proper place. They are theories of verse, not in 
its origin, but in its character as an existing institution 
in the literature of the concrete. They tell us what we 
can now do intellectually by means of verse which we 
could not do if her royalty were abolished. They point 
to the fact that in literature, as in other departments of 
activity, law and order, and even the etiquette of arti- 
ficial ceremonial, though they may impose intolerable 
burdens on the disaffected and the boorish, are but con- 
ditions of liberty and development to all higher, and 
finer, and more cultured natures. In short (and this is 
the important fact), metre, rhyme, and the like, are not 
only devices for the sweet and pleasant conveyance 
of the poet's meaning after it is formed; they are 



THEORIES OF POETRY. 253 

devices assisting beforehand in the creation of that 
meaning. They are devices so spurring and delighting 
the imagination, while they chafe and restrain it, that 
its thoughts and combinations in the world of concrete 
circumstance are more rich, more rare, more occult, 
more beautiful, than they would otherwise be. Like 
the effect of the music on the fountain and the com- 
pany of Bacchanals in Tennyson's strange vision is the 
effect of verse on poetical thought : 

" Then methought I heard a mellow sound, 
Gathering up from all the lower ground ; 
Narrowing in to where they sat assembled, 
Low, voluptuous music winding trembled, 
WoVn in circles : they that heard it sigh'd, 
Panted hand in hand with faces pale, 
Swung themselves, and in low tones replied, 
Till the fountain spouted, showering wide 
Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail." 

Here we must stop our discussion of the Theory of 
Poetry. For much that we have left undiscussed, and 
especially for a philosophical division of poetry accord- 
ing to its kinds, we must refer to Mr. Dallas. We 
recommend his book highly and cordially. There is 
perhaps a stronger dash of what may be called Okenism 
in his style of speculation than some readers may like : 
as, for example, in his systematic laying out of every- 
thing into corresponding threes or triads. Poetry 



254 THEORIES OF POETRY. 

figures throughout this treatise as a compound result 
of three laws — the laws of unconsciousness, the law of 
harmony, and the law of imagination ; which laws are 
supreme respectively in three kinds of poetry — lyrical 
poetry, epic poetry, and dramatic poetry; which three 
kinds of poetry, again, correspond historically with 
Eastern, primitive, or divine art, Grecian, antique, or 
classical art, and Western, modern, or romantic art ; 
which historical division, again, corresponds philoso- 
phically with such trinities as these — I, he, thou ; time 
future, time past, time present; immortality, God, 
freedom; the good, the true, the beautifuL All this, 
stated thus abruptly and without explanation, may 
seem hopeless matter to some ; but even they will find 
in the book much that will please them, in the shape 
of shrewd observation and lucid and deep criticism, 
valuable on its own account, and very different from 
what used to be supplied to the last age by its 
critics. 



VI. 

PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINOEY. 



VI. 

PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 1 

In the Preface to this series of volumes (which is in- 
tended to be a more perfect accomplishment, under the 
author's own editorship, of a scheme of literary collect- 
ion already executed very creditably by an American 
publisher) Mr. De Quincey ventures on something 
rather unusual. He ventures on a theoretical classifi- 
cation of his own writings for the benefit of critics. 
The following is the passage in which he states this 
classification and the grounds of it : — ■ 

"Taking as the basis of my remarks the collective 
American edition, I will here attempt a rude general 
classification of all the articles which compose it. I 
distribute them grossly into three classes : — 

"First, into that class which proposes primarily to 
amuse the reader ; but which, in doing so, may or 
may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, 
at which the amusement passes into an impassioned 
interest. Some papers are merely playful ; but others 

1 British Quarterly Review, July, 1854. — "Selections Grave and 
Gay, from "Writings published and unpublished." By Thomas De 
Quincey. Vols. I. and II., containing "Autobiographic Sketches." 
Edinburgh, 1853-4. 

S 



258 PROSE JAW VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

have a mixed character. These present Autobiographic 
fetches illustrate what I mean. Generally, they pre- 
tend to little beyond that sort of amusement which 
attaches to any real story, thoughtfully and faithfully 
related, moving through a succession of scenes suf- 
ficiently varied, that are not suffered to remain too long 
upon the eye, and that connect themselves at every 
stage with intellectual objects. But, even here, I do 
not scruple to claim from the reader, occasionally, a 
higher consideration. At times, the narrative rises into 
a far higher key. . . . 

"Into the second class I throw those papers which 
address themselves purely to the uDderstanding as an 
insulated faculty, or do so primarily. Let me call 
them by the general name of essays. These, as in 
other cases of the same kind, must have their value 
measured by two separate questions. A. — What is 
the problem, and of what rank in dignity or use, 
which the essay undertakes ? And next — that point 
being settled — B. — What is the success obtained ? and 
(as a separate question) What is the executive ability 
displayed in the solution of the problem ? This latter 
question is naturally no question for myself, as the 
answer would involve a verdict upon my own merit. 
But, generally, there will be quite enough in the answer 
to Question A for establishing the value of any essay 
on its soundest basis. Prudens interrogatio est dimi- 
dium scientice : skilfully to • frame your question is 
half-way towards insuring the true answer. Two or 
three of the problems treated in these essays I will 
here rehearse [Mr. De Quincey here cites, as examples 
of the kind of writings which he refers to the second 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 259 

class, his essays on the following subjects : — Esscnism, 
The Ccesars, and Cicero]. These specimens are sufficient 
for the purpose of informing the reader that I do not 
write without a thoughtful consideration of my subject; 
and, also, that to think reasonably upon any question has 
never been allowed by me as a sufficient ground for writ- 
ing upon it, unless I believed myself able to offer some 
considerable novelty. Generally, I claim (not arrogantly, 
but with firmness) the merit of rectification applied to 
absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth. 
"Finally, as a third class, and, in virtue of their aim, 
as a far higher class of compositions, included in the 
American collection, I rank The Confessions of an 
Opium-Eater, and also (but more emphatically) the 
Suspiria de Profundis. On these, as modes of im- 
passioned prose, ranging under no precedents that I 
am aware of in any literature, it is much more difficult 
to speak justly, whether in a hostile or a friendly cha- 
racter. As yet neither of these two works has ever 
received the least degree of that correction and pruning 
which both require so extensively ; and of the Suspiria 
not more than perhaps one-third has yet been printed. 
When both have been fully revised, I shall feel myself 
entitled to ask for a more determinate adjudication on 
their claims as works of art. At present I feel author- 
ized to make haughtier pretensions in right of their 
conception than I shall venture to do under the peril 
of being supposed to characterize their execution. Two 
remarks only I shall address to the equity of my reader. 
First, I desire to remind him of the perilous difficulty 
besieging all attempts to clothe in words the visionary 
scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single 

s 2 



260 PROSE AND VERSE: DE JUINCEY. 

false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole 
music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter 
sterility of universal literature in this one department 
of impassioned prose — which certainly argues some 
singular difficulty, suggesting a singular duty of 
indulgence in criticising any attempt that even im- 
perfectly succeeds. The sole Confessions, belonging 
to past times, that have at all succeeded in engaging 
the attention of men, are those of St. Austin and of 
Eousseau. The very idea of breathing a record of 
human passion, not into the ear of the random crowd, 
but of the saintly confessional, argues an impassioned 
theme. Impassioned, therefore, should be the tenor of 
the composition. Now, in St. Augustine's Confessions 
is found one most impassioned passage — viz., the 
lamentation for the death of his youthful friend in the 
fourth book; one, and no more. Farther, there is 
nothing. In Eousseau there is not even so much. 
In the whole work there is nothing grandly affecting 
but the character and the inexplicable misery of the 
writer." 

No one acquainted with Mr. De Quincey's writings 
will deny the soundness and the completeness of this 
classification ; nor do we think that a critic, proposing 
to himself so ambitious a task as an appreciation of 
Mr. De Quincey's genius as a whole, could do better 
than quietly assume it, and proceed to examine Mr. De 
Quincey's merits, first as a writer of interesting memoirs, 
secondly, as an essayist or elucidator of difficult 
historical and other problems, and, lastly, as an almost 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 261 

unique practitioner of a peculiar style of imaginative or 
highly impassioned prose. Such an examination, con- 
ducted never so rigorously, if by a competent person, 
would confirm the impression, now entertained on all 
hands, that among the most remarkable names in the 
history of English literature for many a day must be 
ranked that of Thomas De Quincey. Our purpose, 
however, is by no means so extensive. We do not 
mean to comment on Mr. De Quincey as a writer of 
memoirs and narratives, nor to cull from his numerous 
contributions in that department — the present two 
volumes included — any of the delightful reminiscences 
with which they abound. We do not mean, either, to 
follow Mr. De Quincey through any of the various 
tracks of speculation into which his pure intellectual 
activity has led him, and thus to exhibit the delicacy 
and subtlety of his thinking faculty, the range of his 
observation and knowledge, and the value of his con- 
clusions on obscure and vexed questions. In this 
department, we believe, he would be found fully 
entitled to the praise which he has claimed for him- 
self — the praise of having been practically faithful to 
that theory of literature which maintains that no man 
is entitled to write upon a subject merely by having 
something reasonable to say about it, unless that some- 
thing is also, to some extent, new. It is with Mr. De 
Quincey, however, in the last of the three aspects in 



262 PROSE AND VERSE : BE QUINCEY. 

which he has presented himself to notice in the fore- 
going passage that we propose exclusively to concern 
ourselves, We thank Mr. De Quincey for having so 
presented himself. Not only, in so doing, has he 
indicated, w T ith all due modesty, what he esteems his 
peculiar and characteristic place in English literature, 
and the scene and nature of his highest triumphs as 
a writer ; he has also, at the same time, suggested a 
very curious subject for critical discussion. 

By the established custom of all languages, there is a 
great interval between the mental state accounted proper 
in prose writing and that allowed, and even required, 
in verse. A man, for the most part, would be ashamed 
of permitting himself in prose the same freedom of 
intellectual whimsy, the same arbitrariness of com- 
bination, the same riot of imagery, the same care for 
the exquisite in sound and form, perhaps even the 
same depth and fervour of feeling, that he would exhibit 
unabashed in verse. There is an idea that, if the 
matter lying in the mind waiting for expression is of 
a very select and rare kind, or if the mood is peculiarly 
fine and elevated, a writer must quit the platform of 
prose, and ascend into the region of metre. To use a 
homely figure, the feeling is that, in such circumstances, 
one must not remain in the plainly- furnished apartment 
on the ground-floor where ordinary business is transacted, 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCE Y. 263 

but must step up-stairs to the place of elegance and 
leisure. Take, for example, the following passage 
from Comas : — 

" Sabrina fair, 

Listen where thou art sitting, 
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, 

In twisted briads of lilies knitting 
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair ; 
Listen for dear honour's sake, 
Goddess of the silver lake — 
Listen and save." 

If any man, having preconceived exactly the tissue of 
meaning involved in this passage, had tried to express 
it in prose, he would have had a sense of shame in 
doing so, and would have run the risk of being regarded 
as a coxcomb. Only in verse will men consent, in 
general, to receive such specimens of the intellectually 
exquisite ; but offer them never so tiny a thing of the 
kind in verse, and they are not only satisfied, but 
charmed. 2STor is it only with regard to the pecu- 
liarly exquisite, or the peculiarly luscious in meaning, 
that this is true; it is true, also, to a certain extent, 
of the peculiarly sublime, or the peculiarly magnificent. 
Thus Samson, soliloquizing on his blindness — 

" The vilest here excel me ; 
They creep, yet see : I, dark, in light exposed 
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong ; 



264 PROSE AND VERSE : BE QUINCEY. 



Within doors, or without, still as a fool 

In power of others, never in my own; 

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. 

dark, dark, dark ; amid the blaze of noon 

Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, 

Without all hope of day ! 

0, first-created beam, and thou great Word, 

Let there be light, and light was over all ; 

Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree ? 

The sun to me is dark 

And silent as the moon, 

When she deserts the night, 

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." 

In prose something equivalent to this might have been 
permitted by reason of the severe impressiveness of the 
theme ; but, to render the entire mass of thoughts and 
images acceptable precisely as they are, without re- 
trenchment or toning down, one almost requires to see 
the golden cincture of the enclasping verse. Take a 
passage where, this cincture having been purposely re- 
moved in the process of translation, the sheer meaning 
may be seen by itself in a prose-heap. The following is 
a description from iEschylus, literally translated : — 

" So Tydeus, raving and greedy for the fight, wars 
like a serpent in its hissings beneath the noon-tide heat, 
and he smites the sage seer, son of Oicleus, with a 
taunt, saying that he is crouching to death and battle 
out of cowardice. Shouting out such words as these, 
he shakes their shadowy crests, the hairy honours of 



PROSE AND VERSE : BE QUINCEY. 265 

his helm, while beneath his buckler bells cast in brass 
are shrilly pealing terror. On his buckler, too, he has 
this arrogant device — a gleaming sky tricked out with 
stars, and in the centre a brilliant full moon conspicuous, 
most august of the heavenly bodies, the eye of night. 
Chafing thus in his vaunting harness, he wars beside 
the bank of the river, enamoured of conflict, like a steed 
champing his bit with rage, that rushes forth when he 
hears the voice of the trumpet." 

Knowing that this is translated from verse, we admire 
it ; but, if it were presented to us as an original effort of 
description in prose, we should, though still admiring it, 
feel that it went beyond bounds. What we should feel 
would be, not that such a description ought not to be 
given, but that prose is not good enough and leisurely 
enough to have the honour of containing it. And, 
so, generally, when a man launches forth in a grand 
strain, or when he begins to put forth matter more 
than usually rich and luscious, our disposition is to 
interrupt him and persuade him to exchange the style 
for that of metre. " Had we not better step up-stairs ? " 
is virtually what we say on such occasions ; and this not 
ironically, but with a view to hear out what has to be 
said with greater pleasure. In short, we allow all 
ordinary business of a literary kind — plain statement, 
equable narrative, profound investigation, strong direct 
appeal — to be transacted in prose ; we even permit a 
moderate amount of beauty, of enthusiasm, and of ima- 



266 PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

ginative play, to intermingle with the current of prose- 
composition ; hut there is a point, marked either by the 
unusual fineness of the matter of thought, its unusual 
arbitrariness and luxuriance, its unusual grandeur, or 
its unusually impassioned character, at which, by a law 
of custom, a man must either consent to be silent, or 
must lift himself into verse. On such occasions it is as 
when a speaker is expected to leave his ordinary place 
in the body of the house and mount the tribune. 

There is an element in the philosophy of this matter 
which it may be well to attend to before going farther. 
We have spoken as if the meaning to be uttered were 
generally already in the mind before the form of utter- 
ance is chosen. We have represented the case as if 
there were already internally prepared by a writer a 
certain tissue or series of thoughts and images, and as 
if it were then capable of being made a deliberate 
question whether he should emit the intellectual whole 
thus prepared in metre or in prose. But this is not the 
actual state of the fact. The actual fact is that the 
meaning that will in any case exist to be expressed is 
conditioned beforehand by the form of expression 
selected — in other words, that the matter cogitated does 
not precede the form of expression and engage this or 
that form of expression at its option, but that the form 
of expression assists from the outset in determining the 
kind of matter that shall be cogitated. This removes a 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCE Y. 267 

practical difficulty. A man who writes in prose is, by 
the fact that he does so, kept within the bounds of prose 
in the character of his mental combinations. Those 
peculiar finenesses and flights of intellectual activity 
which are native to verse are then simply not developed. 
His thoughts stop short precisely at that point of rich- 
ness, quaintness, or luxuriance, where prose ceases to be 
prose. That this point will vary according to a writer's 
taste and faculty does not for the present matter. On 
the other hand, the writer w 7 ho uses metre and rhyme 
does not prosecute his train of meaning independently 
of them, but partly by their very aid in leading him this 
way or that. A man who has made up his mind to add 
to all the other conditions of his thinking these two — 
first, that he shall think in synchronism with certain 
metrical beats, and, secondly, that he shall think forward 
to that point in his mental horizon where he sees the 
glimmer of a certain predetermined rhyme — such a 
writer necessarily accustoms himself to a more complex 
law of cogitation than rules the prose-writer, and moves 
through an atmosphere of more arbitrary and exquisite 
and occult suggestions. This may look mechanical ; 
but it is the very rationale of verse and its functions. 
Versifiers are men who have voluntarily, in accordance 
with some original bent in their nature, submitted their 
thoughts to a more complex mechanism than ordinary 
prose- writers, and whose reward is that, when they are 



268 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCE Y. 

such masters of the mechanism as no longer to think of 
its existence, they can revel in combinations more in- 
timate, extreme, and exquisite than their prose thoughts 
would be. In reading a passage of verse, therefore, we 
have to bear in mind that the meaning came in part to 
be what it is because the verse assisted to create it. 
Thus, in the passage quoted from Comus, it is unneces- 
sary to trouble ourselves with fancying what reception 
such a dainty little picture would have met with if 
offered originally in prose ; for it is what it is simply 
because metre and rhyme conspired in the production 
of it. So, also, in the passage from Samson Agonistes, 
the mass of thoughts and images would have stood 
somewhat different from the first, had it not been 
shaped implicitly to fill the mould of the precise metre. 
Again, in the description from iEschylus, whatever 
passes the degree of imaginative richness deemed suit- 
able to prose is justified by the recollection that these 
excesses were perpetrated in verse. 

This last instance suggests an observation of some 
importance. It may happen, and does often happen, 
that the metrical form may have been necessary to the 
evolution of a particular piece of meaning, and may yet 
not be so necessary to the preservation and perpetuation 
of it, after it has been produced. Only under the con- 
dition of metre may a thought of special splendour or 
beauty have been actually produced ; and yet, once it 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 269 

is fairly on this side of the Styx, the metrical mould 
necessary for its safe conveyance hither may be frac- 
tured, and the thought will still stand appreciable on 
its own merits. And thus it is that much of the great- 
ness of the highest poetry is indestructible by even the 
rudest process of transmutation into literal prose. The 
actual matter of Homer's Iliad and of the great Greek 
tragedies might never have existed but for the sugges- 
tive power in the minds of the poets of those precise 
hexameters and iambic and choral measures in which 
it was imagined and delivered; but much of what is 
noble in it survives yet in the baldest prose translation. 
The preciousness of the thought i3 to be recognised 
even after the fabric of the verse has been crumbled 
into the mere form of unmetrical powder. 

All this, however, does not affect the practical im- 
portance of the fact that custom has established a 
distinction between what is lawful in prose and what 
is lawful in verse. True, for the reasons above stated, 
the distinction causes no one any personal inconveni- 
ence. He who prefers to write in prose does so because 
he finds he can make prose sufficient. The necessity 
for writing in verse exists only where there is the prior 
habit, if we may so call it, of thinking in verse. When 
the thoughts of a prose-writer reach a degree of ex- 
quisiteness, or lusciousness, or imaginative grandeur, at 
which prose refuses to contain them, nature provides 



270 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 

the remedy by simply whirling him into verse. He has 
the option of allowing himself to be so whirled, or of 
restraining himself, and refusing to go on whenever the 
said point is reached. He may choose never " to go up- 
stairs," never to put himself into such a strain that it 
shall be necessary for him to ascend the tribune in 
order to speak. But here lies the question. Where is 
that ideal point at which a man must either smother 
what is in his mind or ascend the tribune and speak in 
verse ? What are the limits and capabilities of prose ; 
and through what series of gradations does prose pass 
into technical and completed verse ? If a man refuses 
to be whirled past the extreme prose point, what 
amount of farther intellectual possibility, and of what 
precise kinds, does he thus forego? Is the ulterior region 
into which verse admits co- extensive with that which it 
leaves behind ; and, if not, what is its measure ? Does 
it overhang the realm of prose like a superior ether, 
nearer the empyrean, or does it only softly round it to 
a small measurable distance ? Is the relation of prose 
to verse that of absolute inferiority, or of inferiority in 
some respects counterbalanced by superiority in others ? 
In short, what is it that verse can do and prose cannot, 
and what is the value of this special kind of intellectual 
work which only verse can transact ? We have spoken 
vaguely of the boundary between prose and verse as 
being marked by a certain degree of fineness, or ex- 



P1WSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 271 

quisiteness, or occultness, or lusciousness, or arbitrari- 
ness, or grandeur, or passion; lioness, in the matter of 
thought to be expressed ; but we must now seek for a 
more exact definition, so as to see what proportion of 
just human thought prose at its utmost will contain, 
and what residue must either be foregone or relegated 
to verse. 

It will be admitted that for all the purposes of what 
is called investigation, speculation, generalization, philo- 
sophical discussion and exposition, prose is sufficient. 
There is no need for a man " to step up-stairs " so long 
as he deals with matter pertaining to what is called 
the pure understanding. A Kant, a Leibnitz, or a Sir 
William Hamilton, so far as their pure reasonings are con- 
cerned, need never find themselves whirled past the prose 
point, notwithstanding that the matters about which 
their reasoning is employed may be the generalities on 
which the universe rests, and that their conclusions in 
such matters may be the result of vast force of intellect, 
and may set the whole world in amaze. The actual 
reasonings of even a half-inspired Plato may be de- 
livered to their last link without the aid of verse. This, 
then, is much to say in behalf of poor prose. It ought 
to silence the absurd chatter, of many a versifier, exult- 
ing in his technick without any just knowledge of what 
it really is. The large world-shaking abstraction, the 
profound of all-penetrating stroke of intellect, the rich 



272 PROSE AND VERSE : BE QUINCE Y. 

shower of fructifying propositions, the iron chain of 
conquering syllogisms : all these are possible to the 
prose-writer in a manner and to an extent beyond the 
legitimate or usual powers of verse. The verse of a 
Shakespeare, it is true, will teem with matter secreted 
by the purely intellectual organ, the same being so 
interfused with the poetic that the superfluity does 
not seem a fault ; and a Wordsworth may, in beautiful 
metre, reproduce the philosophizings of a Spinoza. But 
even those masters of verse could do nothing in this 
department by the help of their iambics which equal 
power could not have done more rigorously and sys- 
tematically with the iambics away. In passing into 
verse, the poet may take such matter with him ; but he 
must treat it in such a way that, from the point of 
view of the pure thinker, there is a loss of the logical 
virtue. With all the reverence that exists for verse as 
distinct from prose, no one will deny that at the present 
moment there lies imbedded in the prose-treatises of 
the world a mass of most precious substance distinct 
from all that can be found in verse. 

Agaio, prose is sufficient for the expression of at 
least a large proportion of all possible human feeling. 
It would be difficult to say at what pitch of mere feel- 
ing it would be absolutely necessary to go " up-stairs " 
for the means of adequate expression. Joy, sorrow, 
indignation, rage, love, hatred — there is ample scope 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 273 

for the expression of these passions within the limits 
of prose. Impassioned prose oratory can show as 
splendid renderings of some of these passions as any 
that can be found in verse. Indeed there are some 
passions — as, for example, those of laughter and indig- 
nation — which find a more natural utterance in prose. 
And yet it is precisely in this matter of the expres- 
sion of feeling or passion that we first come in sight 
of the natural origin of metre. At a certain pitch of 
fervour or feeling the voice does instinctively lift itself 
into song. Intense grief breaks into a wail, great joy 
bursts into a measured shout, pride moves to a slow 
march ; all extreme passion tends to cadence. " And 
the king was much moved, and went up to the 
chamber over the gate and wept ; and, as he went, thus 
he said, Oh, my son Absalom, my son, my son Absa- 
lom ! Would God I had died for thee ; Oh, Absalom, 
my son, my son ! " Wherever there is emotion like 
this, we have a rudimentary metre in its expression ; 
and verse in all its forms is nothing else than the pro- 
longation and extended ingenious application of this 
hint of nature. It may be laid down as a principle, 
therefore, that impassioned writing tends to the metri- 
cal, and that, though* this tendency may gratify itself 
to a great length within the limits of such wild 
metrical prose as it will itself create for the passing- 
occasion, yet at a certain point in all feelings, and 

T 



274 PBOSE AND VERSE: 1)E QUINCEY. 

more particularly in such feelings as joy, sorrow, and 
love, it will overleap the boundary of what in any 
sense can be called prose, and will seize on that 
artifice of verse which past custom has provided and 
consecrated. Walking by the river-side, full of thought 
and sadness, even the homely rustic minstrel will find 
it natural to pour forth his feelings to the estab- 
lished cadence of some well-known melody : — 

" But minstrel Burn cannot assuage 

His woes while time endureth, 
To see the changes of this age, 

Which fleeting Time procureth : 
Full many a place stands in hard case 

Where joy was wont beforrow, 
With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes, 

And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow." 

Here the very tune of the thought seems to keep time 
with the arm as it moves the bow of an imaginary 
violin. And so with more modern and more cultured 
poets. Thus Tennyson : — 

" Break, break, break, 

On thy cold grey stones, sea ! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me ! 

0, well for the fisherman's boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play ; 

O, well for the sailor-lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay. 



FROSE AND VERSE: DE QU1NCEY. 275 

And the stately ships go on 
: To their haven under the hill ; 

But for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still ! 

Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, sea ! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 

Will never come back to me." 

This is not a case in which the same feeling, to the same 
intensity, could have been expressed in any form of 
metrical prose, and in which, therefore, the verse is only 
adopted to increase the beauty of the form ; it is a case 
in which the feeling had to overleap the bounds of 
possible prose, on pain of being mutilated. 

There remains now only the field of representative 
literature, the literature of the concrete. How far 
does prose stretch over this field ; and what portion 
of it, if any, is the exclusive possession of verse ? The 
field divides itself theoretically into two halves or 
sections — the domain of mere history and description, 
in which the business of the writer is with the actual 
concrete, the actual scenes and events of the world ; 
and the high domain of imagination or fiction, in 
which the business of the writer is with concrete 
furnished forth by his own creative phantasy. 

Is prose sufficient for all the purposes of historical 
or descriptive writing, viewed as separately as may 

t 2 



276 PBOSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

be from that department of imaginative writing into 
which it shades off so gradually ? We should say 
that it is. For all the purposes of exact record, of 
exact reproduction of fact in all its vast variety of 
kinds — fact of scenery, fact of biography, fact of 
history, fact even of transacted passion — prose is 
sufficient, and verse unnecessary, or even objectionable. 
For the true and accurate retention and representation 
of all that man can observe (and a large and splendid 
function this is) prose is superior to verse ; and, when 
this function is committed to verse, there is an in- 
evitable sacrifice of the pure aim of the function, though 
that sacrifice may at times be attended with the gain of 
something supposed to be better. That this statement 
may not be immediately assented to will arise from 
a confusion of the descriptive and the imaginative. 
Thomson's Seasons and much of Wordsworth's poetry 
are called descriptive compositions ; but, properly 
considered, they are not records, but the imaginative 
use of records. Again, Homer is a narrative poet ; 
but narration with him is but a special use of the 
imaginative faculty. Isolate strictly the department 
of historical or descriptive writing proper from that 
into which it so readily shades off, and prose is the 
legitimate king of it. We can conceive but two 
apparent exceptions — first, where verse itself is one 
of the facts to be recorded; and, secondly, where the 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 277 

historian or the describer waxes so warm in the act 
of description that he approaches the singing point. 
In the first case, verse must be treated as any other 
fact ; that is, it must be represented accurately by 
being quoted — which, however, is a prose feat. In the 
second case, it is not the facts that the historian sings, 
but his own impassioned feeling about them : a matter 
alreadjr provided for under another head. 

And now for the real tug of war. What are the 
relative capabilities of Prose and Verse in the great 
field of fictitious or imaginative literature ? It is 
needless to say that here it is that, by the universal 
impression of mankind, Verse is allowed the superior 
rank of the two sisters. The very language we use 
implies this. The word poetry literally means creation 
or fiction, and is thus co-extensive with the whole 
field of literature under notice. And yet it is by a 
deviation from the common usage of speech that we 
use the word poetry in this its wide etymological 
sense. When we speak of a poet, we mean, unless 
we indicate otherwise, a man who writes in verse ; 
when we speak of English poetry, we mean the 
library of English books written in verse. This is 
significant. It indicates the belief that the essential 
act of iro[f)(TL<i is somehow connected with the metrical 
tendency, and best transacts itself in alliance with 
that tendency. In other words, it implies a conviction 



278 PBOSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 

that, when the mind sets itself to work in that 
peculiar manner which we designate by the term 
imagination or imaginative exercise, the assumption 
of the metrical form of expression is natural, and 
perhaps in some cases essential, to it. And yet this 
is contradicted at once, to some extent, by palpable 
fact. In the prose literature of all languages there 
is a vast proportion of works in which the prevailing 
intention of the authors is that of strict iroirjaL^, 
the strict invention and elaboration of an imaginary 
or fictitious concrete. There is the novel; there is 
the prose romance ; there is a prose literature of 
imagination in various forms. Robinson Crusoe, Don 
Quixote, the Waverley Novels, are prose efforts of a 
kind as strictly falling under the head of iroirjav^ or 
creation, in its widest sense, as the Prometheus Vinctus, 
Paradise Lost, or Tennyson's Princess. Accordingly, 
we do sometimes rank the writers of imaginative 
prose among poets or "makers." The question, then, 
arises : can we, by philosophical investigation, or by 
the examination of actual instances, determine in what 
precise conditions it is that the generic act of iroLrjcri^, 
or imaginative exercise, disdains the level ground of 
prose, and even its highest mountain-tops, and rises 
instinctively and necessarily on the wings of verse ? 

There are various kinds of itoLt)<ji$, or imaginative 
exercise, according to the species of concrete imagined. 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 279 

There is the iroirjai^ of mere inanimate objects and 
scenery, as in much of Thomson ; there is the ttoItjgis 
of physiognomy and costume, as in much of Scott and 
Chaucer; there is the iroi^ai^ of incident and action, 
as in narrative poetry ; there is the Troika t? of feelings 
and states of mind, as in songs; there is, as an extension 
of this last, the wolr/cris of character. From the 
masterly exercise of these different kinds of iroi^ais 
in different forms of combination arise the great 
kinds of poetry — the descriptive, the epic, the dra- 
matic, and the lyric. But out of this objective 
classification of the varieties of imaginative exercise 
can we derive the clue we seek ? At first sight not. 
If Thomson and Wordsworth describe imaginary scenes 
in verse, so do Dickens and Scott and a thousand 
others in prose; if we have admirable delineations of 
physiognomy and costume in the Canterbury Pilgrim- 
age, so also have we in the Waverley Novels; if the 
Iliad is an effort of narrative imagination, so also is 
Bon Quixote ; if feelings and characters are represented 
in song and the Iambic drama, so are they also in 
prose fiction. And yet, as was hinted at the outset, 
there does seem to be a condition of the matter 
imagined such that prose will not generally contain 
and convey that matter. What is that condition ? 
The instances cited at the outset served vaguely to 
indicate it. In the quotation from Milton, and in 



280 PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

that from iEschylus, it was felt that there was some- 
thing in the actual matter presented by the passages 
that would have had to be parted with if the medium 
had been prose. Thus, in the first passage, it was 
felt that the image of Sabrina 

" Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, 
In twisted braids of lilies knitting 
The loose train of her amber- dropping hair," 

was too dainty for prose. Again, in the passage from 
iEschylus, it was felt that the description in the follow- 
ing sentence would have sustained some reduction if 
the composition had originally been in the prose form : 

" On his buckler, too, he had this arrogant device — a 
gleaming sky tricked out with stars, and in the centre 
a brilliant full moon conspicuous (most august of the 
heavenly bodies, the eye of night)." 

Prose might have given all of this as far as the paren- 
thesis, but there it would have stopped. 

So far as we had come to any conclusion from these 
instances as to the precise character of that concrete 
which prose instinctively refuses to carry, and which is 
yet welcome if it is presented in verse, we defined it 
as consisting in a certain unusual degree of richness, 
lusciousness, exquisiteness, arbitrariness, occultness, 
grandeur, or passionateness. We will now limit the 
catalogue of qualities to these two, richness and arbi- 



PBOSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 281 

trariness ; and we will aver, as an approximation to 
the truth, that the character of a combination by the 
imaginative faculty which determines that it must take 
place in verse is either an unusual degree of richness 
or an unusual degree of arbitrariness. This may not 
appear to reserve for verse a sufficient monopoly of 
the great intellectual function of iroiif)Gi<$ ; but, duly 
interpreted, it will be found to correspond with the 
fact. It is not, we believe, the mere grandeur or 
magnificence of a phantasy, it is not its mere fine- 
ness, or delicacy, or exquisiteness, that necessarily renders 
prose incapable of it ; it is chiefly its richness, or its 
arbitrariness. The limits of prose as regards the quality 
of passionateness have already been suggested under a 
former head. What we call an " impassioned imagina- 
tion" is a mixed thing, consisting of an objective 
phantasy, with a peculiar subjective mood breathed 
through it : it is irolrjaL^ in conjunction with 7rd0rjaL^- } 
and, having already considered when it is that iraOrjais 
breaks out into singing, we are now concerned only 
with the distinct inquiry at what point, if at any, 
TToirjo-Ls itself insists on becoming metrical. 

In the first place, then, there is a peculiar richness of 
literary concrete of which prose seems to be incapable. 
By richness of concrete we mean very much what is 
meant by excess of imagery. Let there be a splendid 
single combination of the poetical faculty — a splendid 



282 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QTJINCEY. 

imaginary scene, a splendid imaginary incident or 
action, a splendid imaginary state of feeling or 
character — and prose will surely and easily compass 
it. The severe story of a Greek drama may be told 
in outline in noble prose; nay, each incident in such 
a drama may be rendered in a prose narrative so 
as to be impressive and effective. The visual fancy 
of the blind Earl and his guide on the cliff at Dover, 
or of Milton's Satan alighting on the orb of the sun 
and darkening it like a telescopic spot, may also be 
outlined in prose so as finely to affect the imagina- 
tion. And so, universally, a single imagined circum- 
stance, however grand, or a moderately sparse tissue 
of imagined circumstances, may be delivered in prose. 
But, when the outline is thickly filled in with 
imagery ; when, in the expression of the main circum- 
stance already imagined, masses of subsidiary circum- 
stance are adduced; when the stem of the original 
poetic thought does not proceed straight and shaft- 
like, but is clustered round with rich parasitic fancies : 
then prose begins to despair. Thus, in Alexander 
Smith's image descriptive of the commencement of a 
friendship between one youth, the speaker, and another 
whom he admired : — 

" An opulent soul 
Dropt in my path like a great cup of gold, 
All rich and rough with stories of the gods." 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCE Y. 283 

Here tlie main fancy, the cup of gold dropped in tbe 
youth's path, is perfectly within the compass of 
imaginative prose ; but only a daring prose-writer 
would have turned the cup so lovingly to show its 
chasing — or, as we say, would have so dallied with 
the image. Again, in the fine stanza from Keats's 
Eve of St. Agnes : — 

" And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, 
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd ; 
While he from forth the closet brought a heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd ; 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon ; 
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred, 
From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one, 
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon." 

In some very luscious prose, such as we find in the 
Arabian Nights, w r e might have had the picture as 
elaborately finished, and even the same express cata- 
logue of dainties ; but one or two of the touches of 
subsidiary circumstance, as in the first, seventh, and 
last lines, would have been almost certainly omitted. 
Again, much more visibly, in the following passage 
from Paradise Lost, describing Satan defying Gabriel 
and his host of warrior-angels. 

" While thus he spake, the angelic squadron bright 
Turned fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns 



284 PBOSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

Their phalanx, and began to hem him,, round 

"With ported spears, as thick as when a field 

Of Ceres, ripe for harvest, waving bends 

Her bearded grove of ears, which way the wind 

Sways them : the careful ploughman doubting stands, 

Lest on the threshing-floor his hopeful sheaves 

Prove chaff. On the other side, Satan alarmed, 

Collecting all his might, dilated stood, 

Like Teneriffe, or Atlas, unremoved : 

His stature reached the sky, and on his crest 

Sat Horror plumed." 

Here, it is obvious, verse has left prose caught in the 
thicket. The main circumstance could have been 
represented in prose ; and prose might have dared 
one or two of the strokes of subsidiary imagination; 
but such a profusion of simile and metaphor in so 
short a space would have bewildered and encumbered 
it. And so, generally, we may consider it as made 
out that prose is incapable of so rich a literary con- 
crete as verse may justly undertake, and that, where 
prose deals with pure poetic matter, a certain com- 
parative thinness or sparseness is requisite in the 
texture of that matter, however bold or fine or grand 
may be the separate imaginations which compose it. 
Hence it is, we think, that ancient classical poetry, 
and especially Greek epic and dramatic poetry, is 
more capable, as a whole, of retaining its impres- 
siveness when translated into prose than most modern 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCE?. 285 

poetry when similarly treated. The ancient poetry 
was more severe, delighting in imaginations clearly 
and separately sculptured ; the modern muse favours 
richness of subsidiary imagery, and delights in orna- 
menting even its largest creations with minute 
tracery. 

In the second place, a certain degree of arbitrari- 
ness in an imaginative combination seems to place it 
beyond the capacity of ordinary prose. Our meaning 
will be best seen by an example or two. When 
Shelley says, 

" Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity," 

he presents to the mind a singularly beautiful image 
or combination, which is at once accepted and 
enjoyed. Yet it is a combination so different from 
anything likely to have suggested itself to the logical 
understanding, or even to the imagination as swayed 
and directed by the logical understanding, that we 
question if it could have been arrived at but for 
that extraordinary nimbleness in seizing remote 
analogies which is communicated to the mind when it 
thinks under the complex law of metre. A prose- 
writer of great imaginative power will often strike 
out combinations of a high degree of arbitrariness, 
but rarely will he feel himself entitled to such an 



286 PROSE AND VERSE : DE QUINCEY. 

excursion into the occult as the above. So, also, in 
the following passage from Keats : — 

"0 Sorrow! 

"Why dost borrow 
The natural hue of health from vermeil lips ? 

To give maiden blushes 

To the white-rose bushes ? 
Or is it thy dewy hand the daisy tips ? 

Sorrow ! 

"Why dost borrow 
The lustrous passion from a falcon-eye ? 

To give the glow-worm light ? 

Or, on a moonless night, 
To tinge, on siren shores, the salt sea-spry?" 

Here, also, the links of association between idea and 
idea seem to be too occult, and the entire tissue of 
images too arbitrary, for prose to have produced a 
passage exactly equivalent ; and yet, as it is presented 
to us in verse, we have no doubt as to the legitimacy 
of the combination, and are thankful for it. And the 
reason again is that the mind, rising and falling on 
the undulation of metre — poised, so to speak, on 
metrical wings — is enabled to catch more fantastic and 
airy analogies, and to dart to greater distances with 
less sense of difficulty, than when pacing never so 
majestically the terra firma of prose. The following 
from Tennyson is a fine instance of the same : — 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 287 

" The splendour falls on castle walls, 
And snowy summits old in story ; 
The long light shakes across the lakes, 
And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 

Blow, bugle, blow ; set the wild echoes flying ; 

Answer, echoes, answer — dying, dying, dying." 

Here is a combination the coherence of which is felt 
by every imaginative mind, and which possesses a 
singular representative, as distinct from mere ex- 
pository, power; and yet it almost defies analysis. 
Tennyson, as one of those poets who have, most 
remarkably restrained themselves to the essential 
domain of verse, not caring to write what prose might 
have had the power to execute, abounds with similar 
instances. In Shakespeare, too, who has by no means 
so restricted hiinself, but has torn up whole masses of 
the rough prose-world, and submitted them, as well as 
the finer matter of poetic phantasy, to the all-crushing 
power of his verse, we find examples of' the same kind, 
hardly paralleled in the rest of literature. Thus, ad 
aperturam, — 

" Thou remember'st 
Since once I sat upon a promontory, 
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, 
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath 
That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, 
To hear the sea-maid's music." 



288 PEOSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCE Y. 

Again : — 

" Sit, Jessica ; look how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
There's not the smallest orb that thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims." 

We will close this series of examples with a very apt 
one from Milton, -describing the loathsome appearance 
of Sin and her brood at the gates of Hell. 

" Far less abhorred than these 
Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts 
Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore ; 
Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, called 
In secret, riding through the air she comes, 
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance 
With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon 
Eclipses at their charms." 

All these examples seem to make it clear that there 
belongs to verse a certain extreme arbitrariness of 
imaginative association, sometimes taking the character 
of mere light extravagance, sometimes leading to a 
ghastly and unearthly effect, and often surprising the 
mind with unexpected gleams of beauty and grandeur. 
For, though we have already claimed for prose the 
capability of pure grandeur and sublimity, we must 
note here, in the interest of verse, that one source 
of grandeur is this very license of most arbitrary 
combination which verse gives. 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 289 

Some light might, perhaps, be cast on this whole 
question of the relative and essential capabilities of 
verse and prose by a study of the law of Shakespeare's 
instinctive shif tings in his dramas between the two 
modes of writing. In such a study it would require 
to be premised that, as Shakespeare stands, by birth- 
right and choice, on the verse side of the river, and 
only makes occasional excursions to the prose side, 
it is to be expected that his practice will indicate 
rather the range within which prose has the sole title 
than the extent of ground over which it may expatiate 
as joint-proprietor. Forbearing for the present, how- 
ever, any such interesting inquiry, let us be content with 
the approximate conclusions to which we have indepen- 
dently come. These may be recapitulated as follows : — 
That in the whole vast field of the speculative and 
didactic, prose is the legitimate monarch, receiving verse 
but as a visitor and guest, who will carry back bits of 
rich ore and other specimens of the land's produce ; 
that in the great business of record, also, prose is 
pre-eminent, verse but voluntarily assisting; that in 
the expression of passion, and the work of moral 
stimulation, verse and prose meet as co-equals, prose 
undertaking the rougher and harder duty, where passion 
intermingles with the storm of current doctrine, and 
with the play and conflict of social interests — some- 
times, when thus engaged, bursting forth into such 

u 



290 PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINGEY. 

strains of irregular music that verse takes up the echo 
and prolongs it in measured modulation, leaving prose 
rapt and listening to hear itself outdone ; and, lastly, 
that in the noble realm of poetry or imagination 
prose also is capable of all exquisite, beautiful, power- 
ful, and magnificent effects, but that, by reason of a 
greater ease with fancies when they come in crowds, 
and of a greater range and arbitrariness of combination, 
verse here moves with the more royal gait. And thus 
Prose and Yerse are presented as two circles or spheres, 
not entirely separate, as some would make them, but 
intersecting and interpenetrating through a large por- 
tion of both their bulks, and disconnected only in 
two crescents outstanding at the right and left, or, 
if you adjust them differently, at the upper and lower 
extremities. The left or lower crescent, the peculiar 
and sole region of prose, is where we labour amid the 
sheerly didactic or the didactic combined with the 
practical and the stern; the right or upper crescent, 
the peculiar and sole region of verse, is where nraQriGi^ 
at its utmost thrill and ecstasy interblends with the 
highest and most daring troika is. 

What Mr. De Quincey, in his clear and modest self- 
appreciation, claims as one of his titles to a place in 
English literature, if not as his most valued title, is 
that, being expressly a prose writer, he has yet ad- 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINVEY. 201 

vanced farther into the peculiar and established domain 
of verse, as we have just defined it, than almost any 
other prose writer in the language. In the passage we 
quoted from him at the beginning of the paper, he 
represents himself as almost a unique artificer in 
at least one department of impassioned and imagi- 
native prose — that which partakes of the character of 
personal confessions. In universal literature he can 
refer but to one passage, in the Confessions of St. 
Augustine, as coming within the same literary defini- 
tion as parts of his own Opium Eater and of his Suspiria 
de Profundis. This is likely to be true, because Mr. 
De Quincey says it ; but it is well to bear in mind (more 
especially as there is a certain ambiguity in Mr. De 
Quincey's expression — "the utter sterility of universal 
literature in this one department of impassioned prose") 
— that, if there has not been much of impassioned prose- 
writing of this one species, the literature of all lan- 
guages contains noble specimens of impassioned and 
imaginative prose of one kind or another. To name 
the first example that occurs to us, Milton's prose 
works contain passages of such grandeur as almost to 
rival his poetry. Let the following stand as a speci- 
men : it is the concluding passage of his pamphlet on 
the Causes that have hindered the Reformation in 
England, written in the form of an epistle to a friend. 
" Oh ! Sir, I do now feel myself en wrapt on the 

u 2 



292 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QVINOEY. 

sudden into those mazes and labyrinths of dreadful and 
hideous thoughts that which way to get out or which 
way to end I know not, unless I turn mine eyes, and, 
with your help, lift up my hands, to that eternal and 
propitious Throne where nothing is readier than grace 
and refuge to the distresses of mortal suppliants ; and 
as it were a shame to leave these serious thoughts less 
piously than the heathen were wont to conclude their 
graver discourses — 

"Thou, therefore, that sitst in light and glory un- 
approachable, Parent of Angels and Men ! next, thee I 
implore, Omnipotent King, Eedeemer of that lost rem- 
nant whose nature thou didst assume, Ineffable and 
Everlasting Love ! and Thou, the third subsistence 
of Divine Infinitude, Illumining Spirit, the joy and 
solace of created things ! — one tri-personed Godhead ! 
look upon this thy poor and almost spent and expiring 
Church ; leave her not thus a prey to these importunate 
wolves, that wait and think long till they devour thy 
tender flock — these wild boars that have broke into thy 
vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on 
the souls of thy servants. Oh ! let them not bring 
about their damned designs that now stand at the 
entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watch ward 
to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions 
to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal dark- 
ness, where we shall never more see the sun of thy 
truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never 
more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with 
pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken monarchy, 
that now lies labouring under her throes, and struggling 
against the grudges of more dreaded calamities. 

"Oh! Thou, that after the impetuous rage of five 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCE Y. 293 



bloody inundations and the succeeding sword of intes- 
tine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity 
the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick- 
coming sorrows — when we were quite breathless, didst 
motion peace and terms of covenant with us, and, 
having first well-nigh freed us from anti-Christian thral- 
dom, didst build up this Britannic empire to a glorious 
and enviable highth, with all her daughter islands about 
her — stay us in this felicity ; let not the obstinacy of 
our half-obedience and will-worship bring forth that 
viper of sedition that for these fourscore years hath 
been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace ; 
but let her cast her abortive spawn without the danger of 
this travailing and throbbing kingdom, that we may still 
remember, in our solemn thanksgivings, how for us the 
northern ocean, even to the frozen Thule, was scattered 
with the proud shipwracks of the Spanish Armada, and 
the very maw of hell ransacked, and made to give up 
her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that 
horrible and damned blast. 

" Oh, how much more glorious will those former 
deliverances appear, when we shall know them not only 
to have saved us from greatest miseries past, but to 
have reserved us for greatest happiness to come ! 
Hitherto Thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, 
from the unjust and tyrannous chain of thy foes; now 
unite us entirely, and appropriate us to Thyself; tie us 
everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of 
thy Eternal Throne. 

" And now we know, Thou, our most certain hope 
and defence, that thine enemies have been consulting 
all the sorceries of the Great Whore, and have joined 
their plots with that sad intelligencing tyrant that 



294 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 

mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies 
thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded 
our seas : but let them all take counsel together, and 
let it come to nought ; let them decree and do Thou 
cancel it ; let them gather themselves and be scattered ; 
let them embattle themselves and be broken ; let them 
embattle and be broken, for Thou art with us. 

" Then, amidst the hymns and halleluiahs of saints, 
some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains, 
in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate thy 
divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land 
throughout all ages ; whereby this great and warlike 
nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and con- 
tinual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting 
far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on 
hard to that high and happy emulation, to be found the 
soberest, wisest, and most Christian people, at that day, 
when Thou, the Eternal and shortly-expected King, 
shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of 
the world, and, distributing national honours and re- 
wards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put 
an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming the uni- 
versal and mild monarchy through Heaven and Earth. 
When they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, 
and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of 
religion and their country, shall receive, above the in- 
ferior orders of the Blessed, the regal addition of Prin- 
cipalities, Legions, and Thrones, into their glorious 
titles, and, in supereminence of beatific vision progres- 
sing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall 
clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over mea- 
sure for ever. But they, contrary, that by the impairing 
and diminution of the true faith, the distresses and 



PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCE Y. 295 

servitude of their country, aspire to high dignity, rule, 
and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life 
(which God grant them !) shall be thrown down 
eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of Hell, 
where, under the despiteful control, the trample and 
spurn of all the other Damned, that in the anguish of 
their tortures shall have no other ease than to exercise 
a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves 
and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, 
the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most 
underfoot and down-trodden vassals of Perdition." 

This may pass as a specimen of impassioned prose 
hardly to be matched in the English language. For speci- 
mens of what may more properly be called imaginative 
prose we might refer also to English writers, and to some 
English writers now living. But in this connexion it is 
perhaps fairest to name that foreign writer who, by the 
general consent of literary Europe, is accounted facile 
princcps among all prose invaders of the peculiar do- 
minion of verse — the German Jean Paul. All who are 
acquainted with the writings of Jean Paul must be aware 
that, whatever is to be said of his genius as a whole or in 
comparison with that of his compatriot Goethe, in the 
single faculty of wild and rich prose-poesy he is the most 
astonishing even of German writers. Passages verify- 
ing this might be quoted in scores from his fictions. 
The famous dream of Christ and the Universe is perhaps 
his grandest and most daring phantasy of the kind; 



296 PBOSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

and, had we space, we should quote it. We will quote 
instead, a shorter and less awful passage — the singu- 
larly beautiful conclusion of the novel of Quintus Fix- 
lein, describing the solitary walk homewards of a man 
who has just left two dear friends, 

" We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last 
tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my 
friend retired with the soul whom he loves. I re- 
mained alone behind him with the Night. 

" And I walked without aim through woods, through 
valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, 
to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and 
still looked, like the magnet, to the region of midnight, 
to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this- 
upstretching aurora of a morning beneath our feet. 
While night butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, 
white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung 
silvery in the high shadow of the Earth, w 7 hich reaches 
beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began 
the iEolian harp of creation to tremble and to sound, 
blown on from above ; and my immortal soul was a 
string in this harp. The heart of a brother, everlasting 
Man, swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas 
swell under the sun and under the moon. The distant 
village clock struck midnight, mingling, as it were, 
with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity. The 
J limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and 
drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of 
the skin. I walked silently through little hamlets, 
and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled 
upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once- 
bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCE Y. 297 

grey ashes. Cold thought ! clutch not like a cold 
spectre at my heart : I look up to the starry sky, and 
an everlasting chain -stretches thither, and over, and 
below ; and all is life, and warmth, and light, and all 
is Godlike or God. 

" Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little 
city of my dwelling, which I belong to on this side the 
grave ; I returned to the earth ; and in the steeples, 
behind the by-advanced great midnight, it struck half- 
past two. About this hour, in 1794, Mars went down 
in the west, and the moon rose in the east ; and my 
soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike blood which 
is still streaming on the blossoms of spring : ' Ah, 
retire, bloody War, like red Mars ; and thou, still Peace, 
come forth, like the mild divided moon.' " — Mr. Car- 
LYLE's Translation. 

Even after snch a passage as this there are passages 
in Mr. De Quincey's writings the power of which, as 
specimens of skill in impassioned and imaginative 
prose, would be felt as something new. His Confessions . 
his Suspiria de Profimdis, and even his present volumes 
of Autobiographic Sketches, contain passages which, for 
weird beauty, and for skill in embodying the impal- 
pable and the visionary, are not surpassed anywhere in 
poetry. Take the following as an example : it is an 
attempt to impersonate and generalize in distinct living 
shapes those various forms or powers of sorrow that hold 
dominion over man and human life. As there are 
three Graces, three Fates, and three Furies, so, says 
De Quincey, there are three Ladies of Sorrow : — 



298 PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUIJSCEY. 



"THE THREE LADIES OF SORROW. 

"The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachry- 
marum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and 
day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She 
stood in Bama, when a voice was heard of lamentation 
— c Eachel weeping for her children and refusing to be 
comforted.' She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the 
night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of inno- 
cents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which, 
heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, 
woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not 
unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, 
wild and sleepy by turns; oftentimes rising to the 
clouds ; oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears 
a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish 
memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when 
she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of 
organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer 
clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys 
more than Papal at her girdle, which open every cottage 
and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sate all last 
summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that 
so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious 
daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, 
resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to 
travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted 
father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the 
spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring 
was budding, He took her to Himself. But her blind 
father mourns for ever over her; still he dreams at 
midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within 
his own ; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now 
within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater 



PEOSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 209 

Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 
1844-45 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing 
before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished 
to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness 
not less profound. By the power of her keys is it that 
Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the 
chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless 
children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Missis- 
sippi; and her, because she is the first-born of her 
house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with 
the title of ' Madonna.' 

" The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our 
Lady of Sighs. She neither scales the clouds, nor 
walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. 
And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither 
sweet nor subtle ; no man could read their story ; they 
would be found filled with perishing dreams and with 
wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her 
eyes ; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, 
droops for ever — for ever fastens on the dust. She 
weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly 
at intervals. Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy 
and frantic — raging in the highest against heaven, and 
demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs 
never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious 
aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the 
meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she 
may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is 
to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, 
but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is 
desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone 
down ta rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, 
of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in Mediterranean 



300 PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 

galleys, of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, 
blotted out from remembrance in sweet far-off England, 
of the baffled penitent reverting his eye for ever upon 
a solitary grave, which, to him seems the altar over- 
thrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which 
altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards 
pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation 
that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday 
looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he 
points with one hand to the earth our general mother, 
but for him a stepmother, as he points with the other 
hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against 
him sealed and sequestered ; — every woman sitting in 
darkness, without love to shelter her bead, or hope to 
illume her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts 
kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which 
God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been 
stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, 
like sepulchral Jamps among the ancients ; — every nun 
defrauded of her un returning May-time by wicked 
kinsmen, whom God will judge : — every captive in 
every dungeon ; — all that are betrayed, and all that are 
rejected, outcasts by traditionary law, and children of 
hereditary disgrace — all these walk with ' Our Lady of 
Sighs.' She also carries a key ; but she needs it little. 
For her kingdom is chiefly among the tents of shame, 
and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the 
very highest ranks of men she finds chapels of her own ; 
and even in glorious England there are some that, to 
the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, 
who yet secretly have received her mark upon their 
foreheads. 

" But the third sister, who is also the youngest — ! 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCE Y. 301 

Hush ! whisper, whilst we talk of her ! Her kingdom 
is not large, or else no flesh should live ; but within 
that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted 
like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of 
night. She droops not ; and her eyes, rising so high, 
might be hidden by distance. But, being what they 
are, they cannot be hidden ; through the treble veil of 
crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing 
misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers — for 
noon of day, or noon of night — for ebbing or for flow- 
ing tide — may be read from the very ground. She is 
the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies 
and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of 
her power ; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For 
she can approach only those in whom a profound nature 
has been upheaved by central convulsions ; in whom the 
heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of 
tempest from without and tempest from within. Ma- 
donna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still 
with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly 
and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with 
incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. 
She carries no key ; for, though coming rarely amongst 
men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to 
enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, Our 
Lady of Darkness." 

In this noble piece of prose, as in the passages from 
Milton and Bichter, no one can fail to remark, in exact 
accordance with what has been advanced in the course 
of this essay, that, precisely as the passion gains in 
force and intensity, and the pure process of poetic 



302 PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCE Y. 

combination transacts itself with ease and vigour, the 
language acquires and sustains a more decided metrical 
cadence. It would not be difficult to arrange parts of 
the passages so that what has been printed as prose 
should present to the eye the appearance of irregular 
verse. And so, generally, a peculiar rhythm or music 
will always be found in highly impassioned or imagi- 
native prose. The voice swells with its burthen ; the 
hand rises and falls ; the foot beats time. And thus, 
as we have more than once said, prose passes into verse 
by visible gradations. Still, there is a clear line of 
separation between the most metrical prose and what 
is conventionally recognised as verse ; and with all the 
great effects that may be produced on this side of the 
line of separation, Prose, as such, is entitled to be 
credited. And why should not prose do its utmost ? 
Whv should we not have more men like Eichter and 
De Quincey, to teach prose its uses and capabilities ? 
"The muse of prose-literature," we have ventured to 
say on another occasion, "has been very hardly dealt 
with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be 
much of that license in the fantastic, that measured 
riot, that right of whimsy, that unabashed dalliance 
with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world 
allows, by prescription, to verse. "Why may not prose 
chase forest-nymphs, and see little green-eyed elves, 
and delight in peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the 



PROSE AND VEBSE: DE QUINCEY. 303 

stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the seas 
thundering through, caverns and dashing against the 
promontories ? Why, in prose, quail from the grand 
or ghastly on the one hand, or blush with shame at too 
much of the exquisite on the other ? Is Prose made 
of iron? Must it never weep, never laugh, never 
linger to look at a buttercup, never ride at a gallop over 
the downs ? Always at a steady trot, transacting only 
such business as may be done within the limits of a 
soft sigh on the one hand and a thin smile on the other, 
must it leave all finer and higher work of imagina- 
tion to the care of Verse ? " All speed, then, to the 
prose invasion of the peculiar realm of verse ! The 
farther the conquest can proceed, perhaps the better in 
the end for both parties. The time is perhaps coming 
when the best prose shall be more like verse than it 
now is, and the best verse shall not disdain a certain 
resemblance to prose. 

A word in conclusion, to prevent misconception. We 
have tried to define the special and peculiar domain of 
Yerse ; but we have scrupulously avoided saying any- 
thing that would imply an opinion that Verse may not, 
both lawfully and with good effect, go beyond that 
domain. We have all along supposed the contrary. 
Verse, merely as a form of expression, has charms of 
its own. A thought, au incident, or a feeling, which 



304 PROSE AND VERSE: DE QUINCEY. 

may be perfectly well expressed in prose, may be 
rendered more pleasing, more impressive, and more 
memorable, by being expressed in metre or rhyme. If 
a man has some doctrine or theory which he wishes to 
expound, there is no reason, if he finds it possible, and 
chooses to take the trouble, why he should not make 
the exposition a metrical one ; and, if his verses are 
good, there is every probability that, on account of the 
public relish for metre in itself, his exposition will 
take a more secure place in literature than would have 
been attained by a corresponding piece of didactic 
prose. So also a witticism, or a description, or a plain, 
homely story, may often be delivered more neatly, 
tersely, and delightfully, if it comes in the garb of 
verse. In the same way, a man may often impress 
more powerfully some strongly-felt sentiment by throw- 
ing it into a series of nervous and hearty lines. In 
short, we ought to be ready to accept wit in metre, 
or narrative in metre, or politics in metre, or anything 
else in metre, when we can get it ; and we ought, in 
every such case, to allow all the additional credit to the 
author which is due to his skill in so delightful an art 
as versification. Much of the poetry of Horace, all 
the satires of Juvenal, the Hudibras of Butler, Pope's 
metrical essays, and many other compositions of toler- 
ably diverse kinds, may be cited as examples of that 
order of poetry which consists of shrewdness, wit, 



PROSE AND VERSE: BE QUINCEY. 305 

manly feeling, and general intellectual vigour, mani- 
festing themselves in metre. Who does not admire the 
literary felicity displayed in such works, and who, 
having them in his mind, can remain insensible to the 
claims of verse to ransre at large wherever it chooses to 
go ? What we wish to make clear, however, is that a 
distinction may and must be drawn between verse con- 
sidered as an essential condition of a peculiar kind of 
thought and verse considered as an optional form of 
expression which may be chosen, in almost any case, 
for the sake of its fine and elegant effects. The fact 
that verse may be regarded in this latter aspect is 
perhaps the sole justification of nine-tenths of what is 
called poetry in all languages. 



THE END. 



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above all, for the working studeut, this is the best of all existing Shakespeares." — 
Athenceum. 

MORTE D' ARTHUR. Sir Thomas Malory's Book of 

King Arthur, and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table. The 
Edition of Caxtou, revised for Modern Use. With an Introduction, 
Notes, and Glossary, by Sir Edward Strachey. 

"It is with perfect confidence that we recommend this edition of the old romance 
to every class of readers." — Pall Mall Gazette 

BURNS'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Poems, Songs, and 
Letters. Edited, with Glossarial Index and Biographical Memoir, 
by Alexander Smith. 

"The works of the bard have never been offered in such a complete form in a 
single volume." — Glasgow Herald. 

"Admirable in all respects." — Spectator. 

ROBINSON CRUSOE. Edited after the Original Editions, 
with Biographical Introduction, by Henry Kingsley. 

"A most excellent, and, in every way, desirable edition." — Court Circular. 

SCOTT'S POETICAL WORKS. With Biographical and 

Critical Essay, by Francis Turner Palgrave. 

" We can almost sympathize with a middle-aged grumbler, who, after reading 
Mr. Palgrave's Memoir and Introduction, should exclaim, 'Why was there not 
such an edition of Scott when I was a schoolboy? ' "—Guardian. 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 



GLOBE LIBRARY (Continued), 

GOLDSMITH'S MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. With 

Biographical Introduction by Prof. Masson. 
" Cheap, elegant, and complete." — Nonconformist. 

SPENSER'S COMPLETE WORKS. Edited, with Glossary, 
by B. Morris, and Memoir, by J. W. Hales. 

""Worthy — and higher praise it needs not — of the beautiful 'Globe Series.'" — 
Daily News. 

POPE'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited, with Notes and 
Introductory Memoir, by Professor Ward. 

" The book is handsome and handy." — Athenaeum. 

DRYDEN'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited, with a Revised 
Text and Notes, by W. D. Christie, M.A., Trinity College, 
Cambridge. 

" It is hardly possible that a better or more handy edition of this poet could be 
produced." — Athenaeum. 

COWPER'S POETICAL WORKS. Edited, with Notes 
and Biographical Introduction, by "W. Benham, M.A., Professor 
of Modern History in Queen's College, London. 

"An edition of permanent value. Altogether a very excellent book. "Saturday 

Review. 

VIRGIL'S WORKS. Rendered into English Prose. With 
Introductions, Notes, Analysis, and Index, by John Lonsdale, 
M.A., and S. Lee, M.A. 

' ' A more complete edition of Virgil in English it is scarcely possible to conceive 
than the scholarly work before us." — Globe. 

HORACE. Rendered into English Prose. With Intro- 
ductions, Analysis, Notes, &c, by J. Lonsdale, M.A, and S. 
Lee, M.A. 

" A clear, faithful, and graceful translation of the works of Horace."— Westminster 
Review. 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 




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